THE TRIANGLE OF SUCCESS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2007
“Every one of us is like a man who sees things in a dream and thinks that he knows perfectly and then wakes up to find that he knows nothing.”
Plato, The Statesman
“Thinking does not bring knowledge in the human. Thinking does not produce usable practical wisdom. Thinking does not solve the riddle of the universe. Thinking does not endow us directly with the power to act.”
Martin Heidegger
German philosopher
I was talking to my Beautiful Betty of a Saturday morning about this or that when she mentioned a friend who feels she is making a good living but is not appreciated. BB said, “She is very clever, but she doesn’t always put her best foot forward with others.”
She went on to mention some of the things she has done that were quite clever and innovative, but were not acknowledged. I could not help but think that would never happen to my BB because “Who You Are” (essence) and “What You Are” (personality) are quite in sync with her. As I was thinking this, she added that there was quite a gap between her intelligence and her formal education.
This made me whisper to myself, ah!
“Perhaps,” I suggested, “your friend doesn’t understand the success triangle.” BB smiled, “Of course you expect me to ask now, ‘what is it,’ but I’ll simply let you tell me." So, I did.
THE SUCCESS TRIANGLE
The success triangle has three legs, and all are equally important. Intelligence is one. Education is another. Politics is the third. If any one of these legs is of insufficient length compared to the other two, the chair will tumble and the person on it with it.
INTELLIGENCE
We are all born with intelligence. We have allowed the bureaucrats to limit this to intelligence quotient (IQ), which is the mental age, gleaned from a culturally biased test, divided by the chronological age of the tested person, and times 100.
A person who is ten years old and has a mental age of ten is therefore considered to have an IQ of 100, which is considered average or “normal.”
It is this relationship, up or down, that determines whether we are considered “gifted” or “retarded.” Unfortunately, our whole system for the past century has been relegated to this scale, slotting us accordingly, as if IQ were intelligence personified, which it is not.
Studies have shown, for example, when teachers were told the children (in a sample) were “gifted,” IQ scores rose; when told children were average or below, IQ scores fell by a statistically significant 10 points; 10 points that either bumped the IQ of the individual above or below scores before the study was conducted.
The unfortunate thing about this is children carry the bias of this test score into school and adult life seeing themselves as either “gifted” or “average” or “below average.” What we think we become.
Children are slotted in school and workers in life according to expectations, and such expectations are based, to a large degree, on this synthetic measure. This is consequential because the use of our intelligence is a function of ours and others expectations of us. It translates into if we are not expected to do well we probably won't. In a word, society has created a problem that didn’t previously exist. The solution, the IQ test score, is iatrogenic creating a false positive.
Late in the twentieth century and early in the twenty-first, educators are finding there are many dimensions to intelligence, ranging from academic, practical, social, emotional, to athletic.
EDUCATION
Education in the twentieth century, which continues into the present, is considered the ticket to the good life, and to health, wealth and happiness.
The problem with this is that education is skewed to credentials and to academics, or to the ticket, and not necessarily to the skills. A lot of people fall between the crack between intelligence and education because they have the intelligence for academics but not the opportunity, or they have the intelligence for other pursuits but limited opportunity.
Society is not built on scholars nor on a quantitative college educated population. Society is built on the universal exploitation of human resources in all its hues and cries. Nothing is one dimensional.
Education as a strategy when the focus is on a biased sense of essence (Who You Are) and a limited or predisposed career landscape (What You Are) can produce, and often does, a mismeasured product.
Academic intelligence is likely to be a good fit with the contemplative academically inclined, but not necessarily with the “hands on” person. He is driven by practical action. Some people love to read books as an end in itself; others read books as a means to an end. We need both as worthy pursuits to widen our horizons and perfect those that we have.
Scholars find books as a way to greater scholarship, while people of practical intelligence use book learning to work for them in specific ways. Where the absurd comes in is with athletic intelligence.
Many with supreme athletic intelligence could care less about schoolwork, but find it necessary to go to college, as that is the minor league of professional sport.
Academic students enjoy being spectators to college athletics as a respite from the academic grind. Consequently, college athletes are essentially hired jocks to perform for this audience, with the secondary possibility of earning a degree. If you have had any connection with college athletics, either as a participant or as a tutor, you know of the high jinx and hypocrisy involved.
On the other hand, quite intelligent people can find themselves bereft of sufficient formal education because of circumstances or poor choices in life. They can suffer mightily economically and socially for this shortfall.
Such people can be extremely clever, quite able and willing to learn new things, but since they lack academic credentials, they are slotted to positions often inferior to their ability and potential with little chance of escape.
I'm sure the reader knows of such people. They can be working for a college-trained individual, who gets all the credit, and makes the big bucks, while they do most of the work. Something is wrong with this picture, or is there?
True, some of them find their way into tradecrafts but there is not enough opportunity there, as society has concluded: who wants to be a plumber, pipe fitter, carpenter, electrician or maintenance worker if they can help it? It infers this work doesn't require high level skills, a major contributor, I might add, to our breakdown culture.
Sad to say too many people look down their noses at these very important jobs. That is doubly sad because that is where “Who They Are” would find them most competent, satisfied, and appreciated by being “What They Are.”
They could go into business for themselves, but there is another problem here: they would likely lack the appropriate education in running a business.
Now, they could go to a community college, and develop the appropriate skills, but such training is nonspecific for their purposes. Besides, they would be with college students perhaps half their age. If there is anything we are sensitive about, it is how we look compared to others in a given situation. None of us like to appear vulnerable even when we are.
What budding entrepreneurs need is a step-by-step curriculum designed specifically for them and in a climate that would make them feel comfortable with like minded pursuers. They could then pursue becoming as competent as any CEO running a company.
Much of my adult life has been spent either as an internal or external consultant to major corporations. Since leaving that culture, I have found the same problem exists in small firms in all walks of life.
There are scores of very clever people, people who could do much more than they are now doing, but for the lack of challenging and appropriate education.
Notice I say “education,” and not “skills training.” These are people that are quasi-professionals, often called technicians that have had no college, little college, and possibly, not even a high school diploma. They were born with high intelligence (Who They Are) that has been blunted by circumstances, poor choices, or aided and abetted by a warped personality (What They Are). Consequently, few realize their potential because “What They Are” blinds them from the prospect of using “Who They Are.” This is where politics enters.
POLITICS
We have this comfort level that we elect politicians to do our bidding, criticize them when they fall short of the mark, and feel no guilt for being completely oblivious to the fact that we are all politicians, every last one of us.
We are politicians every waking moment of our lives. Politicians are influence peddlers. That is what politics is: influencing others. We are all selling our influence or placing barriers to it by the way we think, feel, act and behave.
Influence is one of those counter intuitive dimensions of personality or “What We Are.” Let us say, for argument's sake, you have a “genius” IQ, and you go around demonstrating to others how much “smarter” you are than they are. You will find the more you demonstrate this propensity the less influence you have until you have none. Should that happen, people would likely delight in seeing you fail. They may actually do something to make it happen.
Let us say you are a brilliant engineer and you punish colleagues and people outside the discipline with your brilliance, again your influence will be nil and you will become a pariah among your own ranks. Unfortunately, it is likely you will be the last person to understand that is the reason you are not making satisfactory progress in your career.
So, when you peddle your influence, you lose it. When you allow others to recognize it in you, and are modest about it, you gain it.
Influence or the lack of influence doesn’t stop there. Let us return to the thinking, feeling, acting, and behaving.
Again, for argument's sake, imagine you hate your job, hate what you are doing, feel it is demeaning, but do it mechanically and robotically to get it done, and behave as if your dentist is extracting your teeth all the while.
What amazes me about people that operate like this, and I have known legions, is that they are always surprised when the ax falls, when they are demoted, made redundant, or fired. We conveniently put this under the broad umbrella of “they have a bad attitude,” but that doesn’t even start to cover it.
Attitude is simply the predisposition to act in a certain way. All the poisons in our minds collect to wreck our will as surely as cancer cells can wreck our bodies. Others sense how we feel without saying a word. When our will is not working for us, it is working against us. The will is never inactive.
A person close to me has been literally dying for twenty years with so many physical complications you would have thought she would have died long ago. But her will is strong, just as strong as it ever was. Some scoff at the idea of “being reborn” as she was more than fifty years ago in her Christian faith, but I see it as something that has supported that will and carried her in harmony with it ever since. Yes, she will die one day as we all do, but she has demonstrated to me the power of will.
HOW DESIRE CAN STEER US IN THE WRONG DIRECTION
Ideally, the way the three legs of triangle can support us is to take our cleverness, our intelligence, and reduce the gap between intelligence and education. Notice I am not speaking of education in the formal book learning, schoolroom sense necessarily, but as a friend insists on lifelong learning.
There is no reason we should not be able to get this on the job if we come into the working environment inappropriately skilled. It does happen to many, but not to everyone because of their personality (What They Are). As I’ve indicated, we can make it a problem for ourselves, but sometimes the system is a barrier difficult to penetrate.
Imagine you want to get ahead in an organization and all the others have college degrees and you do not, but you are as intelligent as any of them, possibly more so. Is this going to work for or against you?
If you try to see how the political landscape lies, and attempt to back the “right horses,” you could develop a gulf between yourself and the herd. If the gamble is right, there is a good chance you’ll get the skills training you need and you’ll find yourself making progress. If wrong, you will never have an even chance in this environment. History will follow anf foil you.
Now, if you see how the political landscape lies, and choose instead to treat everyone with respect, never talk out of turn about anyone, and always give your best, it is another matter. You will be demonstrating your capacity to learn and ability to problem solve, which will enhance your reputation. Not everyone necessarily will like you, but the wind will be at your back and “Who You Are” will make “What You Are” more a possibility.
I have witnessed both scenarios many times, as I’m sure the reader has as well.
WHAT IT ALL MEANS
We are all imperfect beings but perfectible. We need help in that perfection. We are blessed with intelligence, we develop a personality, and can come to realize our influence if “Who We Are” and “What We Are” come into some balance.
Some of us do this with relative ease; most of us do not. That is why the help is so vital. But to get that help we must first help ourselves, and again, many of us fail to do that.
It is a matter of stubbornness, not believing we need it, but probably more a case of not knowing ourselves. Self-ignorance is something our culture unwittingly encourages as it reifies artificial indicators, which can prevent rather than accommodate us from realizing our potential.
It is the reliance on artificial constructs or indices that has become an institutional problem at all levels: family, school, church, industry, commerce, and government. Society wants so desperately to place us all in convenient boxes or stereotypes.
It sometimes appears as if we are a society that doesn’t have a clue as to “Who We Are” and therefore “What We Are” keeps getting in our way, domestically and internationally.
I’m not supposed to make those quantum leaps from the individual to society, for it isn’t considered good scholarship, good reasoning, and certainly not reinforcing semantics, but I do it all the time, as readers can attest.
* * * * * *
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Friday, January 12, 2007
SELF-ESTEEM -- AN EXCHANGE ON THE SUBJECT!
SELF-ESTEEM -- AN EXCHANGE ON THE SUBJECT!
Note: This is an exchange on a most sensitive issue. That is the reason for sharing.
GEORGE WROTE:
Hi Jim and Happy New Year to you and BB. Once again thank you so much for keeping me in the loop, as it were. I owe a great deal to you for opening my eyes in so many ways, for comforting me, and for reassuring me at times as I struggled to understand certain situations at work and home. I think it’s been almost 10 years since I first encountered your writing on the Statewave website. And, I thank God for the Internet!
This seems like as good a time as any to share this item with you. I have mentioned to you before my reservations about this building of self-esteem in children by doting parents. I have seen some of the results and it’s not pretty. Your “cage” metaphor is perfect for some of the people who develop this high self-esteem without a work ethic and with no sense of personal responsibility. It seems others have noticed what you and I have.
This Dr. Mezmer is a clever fellow certainly, witty and with a way with words. I actually disagree with him that his mouse example illustrates the building of self-esteem but he’s onto something.
By my own definition he is talking more about confidence. It’s all mixed together I think. Regardless, I thought you would might like to see it and I’m a bit curious what you think of his point. I admit, I only scanned your essay quickly but I intend to read it through before saying anything about it. But hey, thanks for writing it and for sending a copy to me.
Very best regards from Calgary,
Your friend, George
PS One comment concerning our children:
As parents we think we know what and who our children are and likely, as you say, we do not. But certainly, from the opposite standpoint, the same is true for our children. They know we are their parents, i.e., what we are, but do they ever think about who we are? Not that I can see.
But since at a certain age they consider themselves quite grown up and extremely wise, isn’t it apropos for a parent suggest to these all-knowing people of the world that they really don’t know “who” we are either and to stop projecting their limiting concept of us onto our persons. That is, stop treating us as father and mother and start seeing us for who we really are. That could be very liberating for parents. Can you write an article like that for our adult children to read Jim? I hope so.
Thanks and regards, George
MY RESPONSE TO GEORGE:
George,
Thank you for your response
I'm afraid children don't see their parents as persons (WHO WE ARE) until they become parents themselves, and then the shit really hits the fan. My children (all but one) are in their forties, and a little of that light is starting to break through.
Recently, my brother-in-law and my BB's sister were here. They have one of those monster mobile homes on wheels. They never learned to say "no" to their kids, who even though now married (and remarried in a couple cases several times) have failed to grow up, and are still attempting to take an easy ride off of "dad and mom." The monster mobile home on wheels is their great escape.
One daughter, whom they thought was on a two-week vacation, literally moved in with them with her husband and two kids, and stayed for months. To reconcile the situation, what do you imagine they did? They gave them their house and built their own. This is only one of their excesses.
They gave another son a home and large piece of property, which he sold and took the profits to buy even a larger piece of property (none of profits did he return to his parents). Then he got into trouble on the taxes, upkeep and mortgage, and now he is at the point of foreclosure.
Guess what? He is looking for his parents to bail him out again certain that they won't let him tank it. Obviously, he fails to see the irony in this.
In another case, two brothers and two sisters were each given five-figure sums from their octogenarian father who didn't want to get his assets caught up in inheritance taxes when he died.
All four were traumatized that their children might find out and demand the money. Not one of them had the gumption to hold their ground to such demands, and say, "no!" So, a little conspiracy developed among them to hedge off that confrontation. I watched this with great sadness, knowing there was nothing I could do or say for them to see the absurdity of this.
This is why BB's sister and husband hit the road. They cannot find the capacity to say "no." So, they say to me, whom they think is a hard ass (which I am), in defense of their posture: "How could you say 'no' when your grandchildren are involved?"
I guess they expected me to concede, well, that is different, but it is not. I wasn't put on earth to raise my children's children. If they won't assume the responsibility and don't have the capacity to love and care for them, then they don't deserve them. They will lose them to the state.
I have one daughter that has demonstrated a capacity to ruin her own life and to have no option than to send her son to my ex-wife in Iowa, and have him reared there. She never asked me to do it, as she knew the answer. She is lucky for that option because I would not assume that responsibility.
If I were a legislator, I would create a law that would have such parents' wages garnisheed (I think that is the term) to support such children, or put the parents in jail.
We have created a society here in America of people without conscience and consequence and it permeates all levels. We are meant to be the heavy for their mistakes if we don't capitulate and take them off the hook, as if it is our problem, and not theirs.
It is not enough to say, "I'm sorry," and leave it at that for screw up after screw up. Someone must pay, and that is not ambulance chasing parents bailing out their grown up children who refuse to grow up.
Everyone is responsible for their own actions, and nobody else. If they don't learn from their mistakes, and keep repeating them, then it is "they" that should suffer, not everyone else. If they do not see the light, it is not for us to pay for their darkness.
My brother-in-law was talking to my daughter that has trouble taking control of her life, and he says, "Your father is soft as putty underneath. Do you know that? You think you can't get him to budge; that he is stuck on 'no,' but that is an act."
She shook her head, and said, "It's obvious you don't know my father at all."
I am not "hard" on my kids because I enjoy it. I'm hard on them because life is tough and if you are not tough enough to deal with it then you're going to be beaten down and eaten alive.
There are many ways of dying and the most painful way is to kill yourself by denial, deceit and poor decisions day-by-day-by-day.
As soon as the mind turns naturally to someone else to bail them out of their troubles, then it is obvious that they are lost, and the bailers as well.
Such people have no moral compass, no map to "where we are," and no way to find themselves back to "who we are." Like it or not, life is a morality play with the only sin, waste.
The "what we are" is an immature, self-pitying, permanent child in an adult's body suspended in permanent adolescence.
With such a mindset, we will blast our parents until the day we die complaining "it is all their fault," never having a clue that parents never owned us even though we came through them. They are, at best, our custodians and mentors for at most eighteen years. In all parts of nature, except human, animals have the instinct to recognize this fact of life.
Children today want to play house in their teens like adults -- to bed their mates, eat, drink, smoke, do drugs, and make merry on their parents' credit cards; swear, dance, tattoo and violate their bodies with rings through their lips, eyebrows and tongue in defiance of everyone, but never on their own coin; knock school and education and play the role of know-it-alls when they know nothing, and have the skills to toss hamburgers or wait on tables for the rest of their lives; have fancy cars and all the electronic wonders in the world; and live the idyllic life of affluence without ever earning any of it.
They don't want to put any of it off until they are emotionally ready to take on the responsibilities of their actions.
Only last night I had a conversation with someone who was mentioning all the wonderful electronic tools there are, and how it is hard to keep up with them. I said that electronic toys have nothing to do with the ability to think, problem solve and make decisions.
On the contrary, I said, these electronic toys discourage framing problems in the context that they appear, then looking at their content, and defining them in terms of the most appropriate course of action, which is called thinking and problem solving.
Electronics, which are not going to go away, are yet another crutch that offers escape into the wonderful world of gadgetry instead getting off the dime and off their asses and making a life for themselves.
This is not true of this person I was talking to, as she is a senior in college and has worked hard to get there, but she is surrounded by the types I describe. We are not only what we eat; we are how we live.
Returning to my daughter that never has gotten off the dime, the reason she hasn't is that her siblings have always been there to break her fall, forgive her these mistakes, give her a second, third, fourth, and fifth chance, not realizing the harm they have done to her.
Chronic problems show a pattern that repeats itself ad nauseum with very predictable behaviors and results.
These are not the causes nor are they the symptoms. They are the disease that feeds on itself. Radicalize the pattern and the chronic problem dissolves. For example, if the guys you meet are always in bars, and you become bar bait, which results in the same self-negating behavior, go to church, not to bars, and voila! Change is in the air.
For many of us, we will never grow up if we don't have to. If someone is there (always) when a life lesson confronts us, and is about to be learned, and someone rips it away from our face, then we won't grow up. We will repeat the error again and again.
I don't know this doctor you speak of and so I have no idea how helpful he is. If you find him helpful, that is good enough for me.
George, I had the advantage of being born to parents who were poor in material terms but rich in spiritual ones. I hope it shows IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE.
When I was six-years-old and in the first grade, it was Christmas, and there was just my little sister, Patsy, and my little brother, Jackie, and me. My da came to me on Christmas Eve, and told me that there were no presents for me under the tree; that it was hard times. He said he had a little doll for Patsy, and a Teddy Bear for Jackie, and that was it. He told me he loved me, and my mother repeated the same. My brother and sister were in bed. My parents were not educated, but they were better educated than most parents I have met with pedigrees of distinction.
My parents didn't know it, but they launched their son that day to recognize it was not a material world that made the difference, but a spiritual one. They gave me the greatest present I ever received, and I've never tired of it, the memory of their love and honesty with a little boy.
Be always well,
Jim
-----------------
Note: This is an exchange on a most sensitive issue. That is the reason for sharing.
GEORGE WROTE:
Hi Jim and Happy New Year to you and BB. Once again thank you so much for keeping me in the loop, as it were. I owe a great deal to you for opening my eyes in so many ways, for comforting me, and for reassuring me at times as I struggled to understand certain situations at work and home. I think it’s been almost 10 years since I first encountered your writing on the Statewave website. And, I thank God for the Internet!
This seems like as good a time as any to share this item with you. I have mentioned to you before my reservations about this building of self-esteem in children by doting parents. I have seen some of the results and it’s not pretty. Your “cage” metaphor is perfect for some of the people who develop this high self-esteem without a work ethic and with no sense of personal responsibility. It seems others have noticed what you and I have.
This Dr. Mezmer is a clever fellow certainly, witty and with a way with words. I actually disagree with him that his mouse example illustrates the building of self-esteem but he’s onto something.
By my own definition he is talking more about confidence. It’s all mixed together I think. Regardless, I thought you would might like to see it and I’m a bit curious what you think of his point. I admit, I only scanned your essay quickly but I intend to read it through before saying anything about it. But hey, thanks for writing it and for sending a copy to me.
Very best regards from Calgary,
Your friend, George
PS One comment concerning our children:
As parents we think we know what and who our children are and likely, as you say, we do not. But certainly, from the opposite standpoint, the same is true for our children. They know we are their parents, i.e., what we are, but do they ever think about who we are? Not that I can see.
But since at a certain age they consider themselves quite grown up and extremely wise, isn’t it apropos for a parent suggest to these all-knowing people of the world that they really don’t know “who” we are either and to stop projecting their limiting concept of us onto our persons. That is, stop treating us as father and mother and start seeing us for who we really are. That could be very liberating for parents. Can you write an article like that for our adult children to read Jim? I hope so.
Thanks and regards, George
MY RESPONSE TO GEORGE:
George,
Thank you for your response
I'm afraid children don't see their parents as persons (WHO WE ARE) until they become parents themselves, and then the shit really hits the fan. My children (all but one) are in their forties, and a little of that light is starting to break through.
Recently, my brother-in-law and my BB's sister were here. They have one of those monster mobile homes on wheels. They never learned to say "no" to their kids, who even though now married (and remarried in a couple cases several times) have failed to grow up, and are still attempting to take an easy ride off of "dad and mom." The monster mobile home on wheels is their great escape.
One daughter, whom they thought was on a two-week vacation, literally moved in with them with her husband and two kids, and stayed for months. To reconcile the situation, what do you imagine they did? They gave them their house and built their own. This is only one of their excesses.
They gave another son a home and large piece of property, which he sold and took the profits to buy even a larger piece of property (none of profits did he return to his parents). Then he got into trouble on the taxes, upkeep and mortgage, and now he is at the point of foreclosure.
Guess what? He is looking for his parents to bail him out again certain that they won't let him tank it. Obviously, he fails to see the irony in this.
In another case, two brothers and two sisters were each given five-figure sums from their octogenarian father who didn't want to get his assets caught up in inheritance taxes when he died.
All four were traumatized that their children might find out and demand the money. Not one of them had the gumption to hold their ground to such demands, and say, "no!" So, a little conspiracy developed among them to hedge off that confrontation. I watched this with great sadness, knowing there was nothing I could do or say for them to see the absurdity of this.
This is why BB's sister and husband hit the road. They cannot find the capacity to say "no." So, they say to me, whom they think is a hard ass (which I am), in defense of their posture: "How could you say 'no' when your grandchildren are involved?"
I guess they expected me to concede, well, that is different, but it is not. I wasn't put on earth to raise my children's children. If they won't assume the responsibility and don't have the capacity to love and care for them, then they don't deserve them. They will lose them to the state.
I have one daughter that has demonstrated a capacity to ruin her own life and to have no option than to send her son to my ex-wife in Iowa, and have him reared there. She never asked me to do it, as she knew the answer. She is lucky for that option because I would not assume that responsibility.
If I were a legislator, I would create a law that would have such parents' wages garnisheed (I think that is the term) to support such children, or put the parents in jail.
We have created a society here in America of people without conscience and consequence and it permeates all levels. We are meant to be the heavy for their mistakes if we don't capitulate and take them off the hook, as if it is our problem, and not theirs.
It is not enough to say, "I'm sorry," and leave it at that for screw up after screw up. Someone must pay, and that is not ambulance chasing parents bailing out their grown up children who refuse to grow up.
Everyone is responsible for their own actions, and nobody else. If they don't learn from their mistakes, and keep repeating them, then it is "they" that should suffer, not everyone else. If they do not see the light, it is not for us to pay for their darkness.
My brother-in-law was talking to my daughter that has trouble taking control of her life, and he says, "Your father is soft as putty underneath. Do you know that? You think you can't get him to budge; that he is stuck on 'no,' but that is an act."
She shook her head, and said, "It's obvious you don't know my father at all."
I am not "hard" on my kids because I enjoy it. I'm hard on them because life is tough and if you are not tough enough to deal with it then you're going to be beaten down and eaten alive.
There are many ways of dying and the most painful way is to kill yourself by denial, deceit and poor decisions day-by-day-by-day.
As soon as the mind turns naturally to someone else to bail them out of their troubles, then it is obvious that they are lost, and the bailers as well.
Such people have no moral compass, no map to "where we are," and no way to find themselves back to "who we are." Like it or not, life is a morality play with the only sin, waste.
The "what we are" is an immature, self-pitying, permanent child in an adult's body suspended in permanent adolescence.
With such a mindset, we will blast our parents until the day we die complaining "it is all their fault," never having a clue that parents never owned us even though we came through them. They are, at best, our custodians and mentors for at most eighteen years. In all parts of nature, except human, animals have the instinct to recognize this fact of life.
Children today want to play house in their teens like adults -- to bed their mates, eat, drink, smoke, do drugs, and make merry on their parents' credit cards; swear, dance, tattoo and violate their bodies with rings through their lips, eyebrows and tongue in defiance of everyone, but never on their own coin; knock school and education and play the role of know-it-alls when they know nothing, and have the skills to toss hamburgers or wait on tables for the rest of their lives; have fancy cars and all the electronic wonders in the world; and live the idyllic life of affluence without ever earning any of it.
They don't want to put any of it off until they are emotionally ready to take on the responsibilities of their actions.
Only last night I had a conversation with someone who was mentioning all the wonderful electronic tools there are, and how it is hard to keep up with them. I said that electronic toys have nothing to do with the ability to think, problem solve and make decisions.
On the contrary, I said, these electronic toys discourage framing problems in the context that they appear, then looking at their content, and defining them in terms of the most appropriate course of action, which is called thinking and problem solving.
Electronics, which are not going to go away, are yet another crutch that offers escape into the wonderful world of gadgetry instead getting off the dime and off their asses and making a life for themselves.
This is not true of this person I was talking to, as she is a senior in college and has worked hard to get there, but she is surrounded by the types I describe. We are not only what we eat; we are how we live.
Returning to my daughter that never has gotten off the dime, the reason she hasn't is that her siblings have always been there to break her fall, forgive her these mistakes, give her a second, third, fourth, and fifth chance, not realizing the harm they have done to her.
Chronic problems show a pattern that repeats itself ad nauseum with very predictable behaviors and results.
These are not the causes nor are they the symptoms. They are the disease that feeds on itself. Radicalize the pattern and the chronic problem dissolves. For example, if the guys you meet are always in bars, and you become bar bait, which results in the same self-negating behavior, go to church, not to bars, and voila! Change is in the air.
For many of us, we will never grow up if we don't have to. If someone is there (always) when a life lesson confronts us, and is about to be learned, and someone rips it away from our face, then we won't grow up. We will repeat the error again and again.
I don't know this doctor you speak of and so I have no idea how helpful he is. If you find him helpful, that is good enough for me.
George, I had the advantage of being born to parents who were poor in material terms but rich in spiritual ones. I hope it shows IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE.
When I was six-years-old and in the first grade, it was Christmas, and there was just my little sister, Patsy, and my little brother, Jackie, and me. My da came to me on Christmas Eve, and told me that there were no presents for me under the tree; that it was hard times. He said he had a little doll for Patsy, and a Teddy Bear for Jackie, and that was it. He told me he loved me, and my mother repeated the same. My brother and sister were in bed. My parents were not educated, but they were better educated than most parents I have met with pedigrees of distinction.
My parents didn't know it, but they launched their son that day to recognize it was not a material world that made the difference, but a spiritual one. They gave me the greatest present I ever received, and I've never tired of it, the memory of their love and honesty with a little boy.
Be always well,
Jim
-----------------
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
BUILD SELF-ESTEEM: IT IS WHO AND WHAT YOU ARE!
BUILD SELF-ESTEEM: IT IS WHO AND WHAT YOU ARE!
By James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2007
Is it nature or nurture? WHO WE ARE remains constant. It is what we’re born with, our essence or “real self.”
WHAT WE ARE constantly changes. It is our nurtured self. It is a product of our culture and conditioning, which is dependent on our maturity, discipline, focus, performance, stability, ability to handle adversity.
WHAT WE ARE is fed by WHO WE ARE, so there is much overlapping. Psychologists call WHAT WE ARE “our acquired self,” or personality. It is not easy being human. It has been difficult throughout history to have WHO WE ARE (our character) work in harmony with WHAT WE ARE (our personality).
Psychologists try to show how WHAT WE ARE never escapes any stage of our development — from child to adult to parent. When we interact with each other, the child, adult or parent comes to the fore and acts out the role. So, WHAT WE ARE is a thinking, behaving, and feeling being. We bring all of this to our interactions with others.
HOW THIS PLAYS OUT IN A MACRO SENSE!
WHO WE ARE and WHAT WE ARE were once assumed to be interchangeable. Our father was a farmer, our mother was a homemaker, and we would work the family farm and marry a farm girl and she would be a homemaker like our mother. The same was true of the factory worker, teacher, doctor, or lawyer.
The battle of nature and nurture, of nurturing parent and critical parent is being played out before our eyes every day on television. Dr. Phil feels there is too much nurturing parent and so he leavens the mix of his tough love with a large dose of critical parent. Oprah Winfrey feels there is too much critical parent and leavens her mix of enabling love with a large dose of nurturing parent. Both are popular, and both appeal to WHAT WE ARE without a backward glance to WHO WE ARE.
They are involved in the self-esteem without mentioning it. These talking heads are parent surrogates for those of us who are looking for answers in all the wrong places. It doesn’t stop there.
Forty years ago, parents abandoned the role of parenting their children with both mother and father becoming well-heeled breadwinners. This meant leaving their children to mainly fend for themselves. The parents were having so much fun working and playing and neglecting their traditional role as parents that they, too, didn’t want to grow up because they didn’t want to grow old. It became fashionable to be eternally young.
So, while children had the pleasures of adults without adult constraints, or the maturity to handle such freedom, adults tended to imitate the behavior of their children in dress, manner, and attitude with a total disregard for consequences.
Education became a factory of discipline to compensate for the complete mismanagement in the home environment. While education has been the critical parent, industry has become the nurturing parent. Corporations believed they could bribe poorly prepared workers into learning the appropriate skills and becoming productive workers with generous entitlements, recreational facilities, and meaningless performance reviews. Instead of creating a culture of contribution, they became the workers’ surrogate parent in a dependency relationship. They launched programs they couldn’t guarantee — such as lifetime employment. Workers expected to be educated on the job, not seek education on their own time, even with the company paying for it. They expected the company to pay for all of their health care insurance. Showing up for work on time was made more important than what was accomplished in a day’s work.
Management expected to realize quality of work without changing anything, except cosmetically. Hence, the workplace has gone from a culture of comfort, or management-dependent, to a culture of complacency, or workers counterdependent on the corporation for their total well being. Workers don’t want to grow up, and management would prefer them as children rather than challenging adults to its authority.
HOW THIS PLAYS OUT IN A MICRO SENSE!
From birth onward, we experience joys and disappointments, all the while being told by others WHAT WE ARE as we experience these events. So, it is not surprising that that our true vocation based on WHO WE ARE gets little attention.
I lost my daughter when she was 17. The pain was so deep that it crippled me emotionally. I thought I knew WHO SHE WAS, but I could not fathom WHAT SHE WAS apart from what I expected her to be. I didn’t recognize the changes in her, only saw smooth surfaces with no bumps in the road. I guess I expected her to sublimate from a little girl into a grown women without any messy fluidity between the solid stage of childhood and blissful stage of adulthood. I wasn’t ready for her to become a woman.
WHO SHE WAS up to that time was a devoted daughter, and then she discovered the Florida beaches, and boys discovered her. Guys that looked like movie stars would bring her home in their fancy cars. Then she went off to college at the University of Chicago, where she was discovered by an international modeling agency. WHAT SHE WAS, a model who loved the business and still does, melted nicely with WHO SHE WAS, a six-two, blond, blue-eyed beauty.
For 10 years, I never saw her, but then she had the maturity to come back to her father. She is now the mother of Rachel and Ryan. She still models, and still beautiful in her forties. We play tennis, grab a bite to eat occasionally and share our love of her children.
The teenager years are difficult for both parents and teenagers. It is impossible for the children to remain what parents believe them to be, when they are trying to find out WHAT THEY ARE in terms of WHO THEY ARE. It is impossible for teenagers to be honest with parents because they are struggling to be honest with themselves. Parents forget children grow up with the tape recordings in their brains of their youth.
The genetic code is WHO THEY ARE. They are like an acorn that must grow down into fertile soil in order to rise up to become the mighty oak. We as parents make this natural process unnatural by projecting our fears, being obsessed with control, confusing the roles of critical and nurturing parent.
HOW THIS PLAYS OUT IN A COMPARE AND COMPETE WORLD!
When personality (what we are) becomes more dominant than our essence (who we are), we are likely to chase ambition at the expense of others in a compare-and-compete world. We thus cultivate a desire to distance ourselves from others to win admission into a more elite or prestigious group. It is the dominant code of our society. The downside is that it creates a synthetic culture.
Since most of us are unlikely to become rich and famous, we can imitate them by buying the cars they promote, purchasing homes that resemble theirs, and living imitative lifestyles that approximate caricatures of theirs.
Fewer still would question the merits of competing. We take pride in being a competitive society. Comparing and competing destroy the individual and WHO HE IS. It puts the focus on others at the expense of gaining a grasp of one’s essence.
Psychiatrists Willard and Marguerite Beecher write: “Competition enslaves and degrades the mind. It is one of the most prevalent and destructive forms of psychological dependence. Eventually, it produces a dull, imitative, insensitive, mediocre, burned-out, stereotyped individual devoid of initiative, imagination, originality, and spontaneity.”
WHO WE ARE is likely to encounter many potholes along the road, even though it is all we are. If we pay attention, don’t allow ourselves to be sidetracked, we can realize our potential and satisfy our destiny — but it is not an easy journey.
The combination of WHO WE ARE with WHAT WE ARE in harmony can produce a happy, healthy and satisfied person. When WHO WE ARE dominates WHAT WE ARE we are likely to become out-of-sync with the world around us.
Aside from ambition, when WHAT WE ARE dominates WHO WE ARE, we are likely to be attracted to celebrity worshiping and to lead vicarious lives through second-hand identities. Such a life is mainly that of spectator rather than participant. We live through the achievements of others as doting admirers. We are unlikely to read newspapers, but watch tons of television. We want summaries of information, not details, which television provides in network news three-minute dosages. And we work a job and live a life on automatic pilot without variation.
When WHO WE ARE becomes more dominant than WHAT WE ARE, we can develop an attitude. We don’t need to learn new things because we are already smart enough. We don’t need to meet new people because what can they teach us? We don’t share information outside our specialty because people are too thick to understand. We are suspect of global warming so we drive our SUV tank, dump our spent batteries in the garbage, think nothing of throwing our trash in a vacant lot, and see no point in voting as elections are rigged anyway.
To restore balance, we must get beyond comparing and competing, living second-hand lives, waiting for someone else to take the lead, and criticizing doers to having the gumption to join them. We are contaminated with conflict, which leaves little time to focus on WHO WE ARE to pursue WHAT WE ARE consistent with it.
When children reach a certain age, they try to find out WHAT THEY ARE opposed to WHO THEY ARE. This is a stage of rebellion. They want to separate themselves from their parents, not emulate them. They want their own identity, which is unlikely to differ much from their parents, that is, if the parents allow them the room.
Ironically, I never rebelled until I was married. I was a young executive in South Africa during apartheid. I also saw my Roman Catholicism in a new context as it acquiesced in the midst of this contemptible policy. Suddenly, my life made no sense to me. I resigned a promising career when I was 35 with a wife and four small children to support. For the next three years, I read books, wrote one, and when nearly broke, went back to school to pursue a Ph.D., consulting on the side.
In a sense, I have been rebelling ever since. It has been a tortuous road to marry WHO I AM with WHAT I AM. I am today a writer that hopes this helps to marry your two sides of your divided self into one whole.
____________________
Dr. Fisher is an OD psychologist and the author of The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend. Confident Thinking to be published in 2007. They are available on this website or other Internet providers.
By James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2007
Is it nature or nurture? WHO WE ARE remains constant. It is what we’re born with, our essence or “real self.”
WHAT WE ARE constantly changes. It is our nurtured self. It is a product of our culture and conditioning, which is dependent on our maturity, discipline, focus, performance, stability, ability to handle adversity.
WHAT WE ARE is fed by WHO WE ARE, so there is much overlapping. Psychologists call WHAT WE ARE “our acquired self,” or personality. It is not easy being human. It has been difficult throughout history to have WHO WE ARE (our character) work in harmony with WHAT WE ARE (our personality).
Psychologists try to show how WHAT WE ARE never escapes any stage of our development — from child to adult to parent. When we interact with each other, the child, adult or parent comes to the fore and acts out the role. So, WHAT WE ARE is a thinking, behaving, and feeling being. We bring all of this to our interactions with others.
HOW THIS PLAYS OUT IN A MACRO SENSE!
WHO WE ARE and WHAT WE ARE were once assumed to be interchangeable. Our father was a farmer, our mother was a homemaker, and we would work the family farm and marry a farm girl and she would be a homemaker like our mother. The same was true of the factory worker, teacher, doctor, or lawyer.
The battle of nature and nurture, of nurturing parent and critical parent is being played out before our eyes every day on television. Dr. Phil feels there is too much nurturing parent and so he leavens the mix of his tough love with a large dose of critical parent. Oprah Winfrey feels there is too much critical parent and leavens her mix of enabling love with a large dose of nurturing parent. Both are popular, and both appeal to WHAT WE ARE without a backward glance to WHO WE ARE.
They are involved in the self-esteem without mentioning it. These talking heads are parent surrogates for those of us who are looking for answers in all the wrong places. It doesn’t stop there.
Forty years ago, parents abandoned the role of parenting their children with both mother and father becoming well-heeled breadwinners. This meant leaving their children to mainly fend for themselves. The parents were having so much fun working and playing and neglecting their traditional role as parents that they, too, didn’t want to grow up because they didn’t want to grow old. It became fashionable to be eternally young.
So, while children had the pleasures of adults without adult constraints, or the maturity to handle such freedom, adults tended to imitate the behavior of their children in dress, manner, and attitude with a total disregard for consequences.
Education became a factory of discipline to compensate for the complete mismanagement in the home environment. While education has been the critical parent, industry has become the nurturing parent. Corporations believed they could bribe poorly prepared workers into learning the appropriate skills and becoming productive workers with generous entitlements, recreational facilities, and meaningless performance reviews. Instead of creating a culture of contribution, they became the workers’ surrogate parent in a dependency relationship. They launched programs they couldn’t guarantee — such as lifetime employment. Workers expected to be educated on the job, not seek education on their own time, even with the company paying for it. They expected the company to pay for all of their health care insurance. Showing up for work on time was made more important than what was accomplished in a day’s work.
Management expected to realize quality of work without changing anything, except cosmetically. Hence, the workplace has gone from a culture of comfort, or management-dependent, to a culture of complacency, or workers counterdependent on the corporation for their total well being. Workers don’t want to grow up, and management would prefer them as children rather than challenging adults to its authority.
HOW THIS PLAYS OUT IN A MICRO SENSE!
From birth onward, we experience joys and disappointments, all the while being told by others WHAT WE ARE as we experience these events. So, it is not surprising that that our true vocation based on WHO WE ARE gets little attention.
I lost my daughter when she was 17. The pain was so deep that it crippled me emotionally. I thought I knew WHO SHE WAS, but I could not fathom WHAT SHE WAS apart from what I expected her to be. I didn’t recognize the changes in her, only saw smooth surfaces with no bumps in the road. I guess I expected her to sublimate from a little girl into a grown women without any messy fluidity between the solid stage of childhood and blissful stage of adulthood. I wasn’t ready for her to become a woman.
WHO SHE WAS up to that time was a devoted daughter, and then she discovered the Florida beaches, and boys discovered her. Guys that looked like movie stars would bring her home in their fancy cars. Then she went off to college at the University of Chicago, where she was discovered by an international modeling agency. WHAT SHE WAS, a model who loved the business and still does, melted nicely with WHO SHE WAS, a six-two, blond, blue-eyed beauty.
For 10 years, I never saw her, but then she had the maturity to come back to her father. She is now the mother of Rachel and Ryan. She still models, and still beautiful in her forties. We play tennis, grab a bite to eat occasionally and share our love of her children.
The teenager years are difficult for both parents and teenagers. It is impossible for the children to remain what parents believe them to be, when they are trying to find out WHAT THEY ARE in terms of WHO THEY ARE. It is impossible for teenagers to be honest with parents because they are struggling to be honest with themselves. Parents forget children grow up with the tape recordings in their brains of their youth.
The genetic code is WHO THEY ARE. They are like an acorn that must grow down into fertile soil in order to rise up to become the mighty oak. We as parents make this natural process unnatural by projecting our fears, being obsessed with control, confusing the roles of critical and nurturing parent.
HOW THIS PLAYS OUT IN A COMPARE AND COMPETE WORLD!
When personality (what we are) becomes more dominant than our essence (who we are), we are likely to chase ambition at the expense of others in a compare-and-compete world. We thus cultivate a desire to distance ourselves from others to win admission into a more elite or prestigious group. It is the dominant code of our society. The downside is that it creates a synthetic culture.
Since most of us are unlikely to become rich and famous, we can imitate them by buying the cars they promote, purchasing homes that resemble theirs, and living imitative lifestyles that approximate caricatures of theirs.
Fewer still would question the merits of competing. We take pride in being a competitive society. Comparing and competing destroy the individual and WHO HE IS. It puts the focus on others at the expense of gaining a grasp of one’s essence.
Psychiatrists Willard and Marguerite Beecher write: “Competition enslaves and degrades the mind. It is one of the most prevalent and destructive forms of psychological dependence. Eventually, it produces a dull, imitative, insensitive, mediocre, burned-out, stereotyped individual devoid of initiative, imagination, originality, and spontaneity.”
WHO WE ARE is likely to encounter many potholes along the road, even though it is all we are. If we pay attention, don’t allow ourselves to be sidetracked, we can realize our potential and satisfy our destiny — but it is not an easy journey.
The combination of WHO WE ARE with WHAT WE ARE in harmony can produce a happy, healthy and satisfied person. When WHO WE ARE dominates WHAT WE ARE we are likely to become out-of-sync with the world around us.
Aside from ambition, when WHAT WE ARE dominates WHO WE ARE, we are likely to be attracted to celebrity worshiping and to lead vicarious lives through second-hand identities. Such a life is mainly that of spectator rather than participant. We live through the achievements of others as doting admirers. We are unlikely to read newspapers, but watch tons of television. We want summaries of information, not details, which television provides in network news three-minute dosages. And we work a job and live a life on automatic pilot without variation.
When WHO WE ARE becomes more dominant than WHAT WE ARE, we can develop an attitude. We don’t need to learn new things because we are already smart enough. We don’t need to meet new people because what can they teach us? We don’t share information outside our specialty because people are too thick to understand. We are suspect of global warming so we drive our SUV tank, dump our spent batteries in the garbage, think nothing of throwing our trash in a vacant lot, and see no point in voting as elections are rigged anyway.
To restore balance, we must get beyond comparing and competing, living second-hand lives, waiting for someone else to take the lead, and criticizing doers to having the gumption to join them. We are contaminated with conflict, which leaves little time to focus on WHO WE ARE to pursue WHAT WE ARE consistent with it.
When children reach a certain age, they try to find out WHAT THEY ARE opposed to WHO THEY ARE. This is a stage of rebellion. They want to separate themselves from their parents, not emulate them. They want their own identity, which is unlikely to differ much from their parents, that is, if the parents allow them the room.
Ironically, I never rebelled until I was married. I was a young executive in South Africa during apartheid. I also saw my Roman Catholicism in a new context as it acquiesced in the midst of this contemptible policy. Suddenly, my life made no sense to me. I resigned a promising career when I was 35 with a wife and four small children to support. For the next three years, I read books, wrote one, and when nearly broke, went back to school to pursue a Ph.D., consulting on the side.
In a sense, I have been rebelling ever since. It has been a tortuous road to marry WHO I AM with WHAT I AM. I am today a writer that hopes this helps to marry your two sides of your divided self into one whole.
____________________
Dr. Fisher is an OD psychologist and the author of The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend. Confident Thinking to be published in 2007. They are available on this website or other Internet providers.
IS SOCIETY SICK? Part III PRISONER OF THE MIND
Part III
PRISONER OF THE MIND
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2007
"Psychological manipulation pervades all areas of society, not only through the use of skills and techniques, but through the conveyance of oppressive behavior to the oppressed themselves, and through the use of psychology as an ideology for the defense of the status quo."
Phil Brown (1973)
There is a reluctance to focus on the question: is society sick?
This is not only a problem for professional thinkers but also for laymen. There is a kind of normalcy to the idea that society is sick and people are sick in society. So what?
The frenetic pace of society, the compulsive waste making, the robbing Peter to pay Paul, the planning for planning sake, the living without consequence, the lifestyle diseases, the looking for miraculous drugs to cure addictions, hey, what's all the fuss about? It's the way it is! But is it? And if so, why is it?
We are told we are a nation of believers in God but that doesn't include going to church. We are told we are a religious and caring nation, but that doesn't include knowing and fraternizing with our neighbors next door.
The religion of the West is imbued with the idea of God and the individual as infinitely precious and irreducibly real for his having an immortal soul. Yet, the history of carnage in the West, and violent crime in the United States, contradicts this perception. Thinking and behaving are worlds apart.
Churches are constructed as houses of worship, but have become increasingly empty of worshipers, as modern society has moved away from religious doctrine to empirical dogma.
In Freudian speak, religion once kept the "lid on the Id," but no longer. The moral highway has no speed limits, no consensus rules of the road, and so crashes have become the symphony of the times. We lost 55,000 Americans in the Viet Nam War. We lose that many every year on American highways as a gauge of this reckless carnage and despair.
The Id is running rampant, as there is no Superego in evidence.
The paradox is that everything is set on the rational while everyone is lost in the wilderness of the irrational. Incest and murder, corruption and malfeasance, and coveting the neighbor's wife and property have become banner headlines. We have lost our way. Even being nice has been replaced by being with it.
The idea of the immortal soul has been superseded by the idea of the individual personality, which is not immortal but all the more precious for not being so. Identity and role relationships have become the new psychology. The irony is that psychology rose out of philosophy and has never found its own identity much less its role. So, rather than create that role, it continues to search for it.
The evidence is demonstrated as psychology develops a new branch every time a perplexing problem surfaces. Currently, we have existential psychology, which rises out of a philosophy that is as obtuse as it is absurd, and humanistic psychology, which attempts to be everything to everybody. The clergy, desperate for survival, grab these new psychologies as if long lost relatives, accepting their dogma, and incorporating them into their sermons as if pure gravitas.
In this new age of the idea of the individual, we measure a person's worth not by his bond, or what he has done, but what he can become. It is the philosophy of "wait until next year."
His worth is a measure of his presence, or how good an actor he is. The more he can shock us to attention the more vivid he is. We see him making his mark as an artist, scientist, businessman or entertainer, not on the strength of his performance, but on future promise. He is phantom we have created chasing shadows, but we don't care as long as he is interesting.
I use the word "phantom" in the Buddhist sense. The Buddhist would read the careerist's resume, curriculum vitae, or biography as the preferred picture in the individual's mind. Picture is not a person, but a touched up portrait removed of blemishes. This makes the individual appear near perfect if unreal, while treating that phantom world as real.
This has created the current mirage in which, seemingly, we all look alike, dress alike, speak alike, think alike, and behave alike as if we have no identity at all, or as if our shadow is real and we are not.
This persistence of memory is buttressed with our programmed conformity. We like to think we are different because we have a given and surname and are told we have an individual self. This fails to refute the fact that we are a society of sleepwalkers addressing each other within this dream of selfhood.
All our ideas of morality and obligation, blame and praise are based on this dream and serve only to strengthen the illusion of its reality.
In this age of manipulation, what Everett Shostrom (1967) calls our obsession with thingness; we delight in playing the fraud on ourselves to disguise our false consciousness. Phil Brown writes:
"Industrial psychologists make factory workers more comfortable, but only in ways to sap their militancy and thus insure corporate profit; fancy lounges and counseling services are traded off for speed ups of the assembly line. Advertising psychologists aid the corporations on the opposite end by brainwashing people into consuming harmful and/or meaningless products. School psychologists push working class children into vocational tracks, while placing middle strata children into academic tracks. Military psychologists polish the machinery of U S imperialism providing adjustment for antiwar GI's. Social psychologists perform research for counter insurgency plans and racial inequality. IQ research by men such as Jensen and Herrstein not only provides the ruling class's answer to black struggles for freedom, but also provides the rational basis for repression since it is scientific."
Erasmus would see the folly in all this, but these people are dead serious and they are playing with people's minds. Time (December 31, 1973) sees this as a new definition of corruption where money may not be involved but the way people are perceived and treated is.
There is an up and down war that constantly goes on in the social and behavioral sciences. Experimental psychologists who play with mice all day pride themselves on their rigorous research designs. They put down sociologists because they have less precise methodologies, and have been known to speculate about their findings. Both psychologists and sociologists put down anthropologists because they seldom use statistical analysis in their value-laden case studies. Political scientists, historians and geographers are even held in less repute.
Should anyone take a side road into philosophical speculation, he is likely never to be invited back. He has committed the cardinal sin of becoming an interdisciplinarian, venturing outside the sacred walls of his discipline and contaminating himself with culture. Ernest Becker took this plunge in "The Birth and Death of Meaning" (1971) never again to be considered comfortable by his colleagues.
George Bernard Shaw was fond to remind us that the virtues we hold dear to our hearts have a price tag on them. Shaw asked an elegant lady of society if she would go to bed with him for 20,000 British pounds. She replied, "But of course, silly, who wouldn't?" Then Shaw parried, "Would you go to bed with me for five pounds?" Indignantly, the lady said, "I most certainly wouldn't," then added, "what kind of a woman do you think I am?" To which Shaw rejoined, "We already know that, now don't we? We're just trying to determine your price range."
The games scholars play is not unlike the game we all play. Scholars lie. Scholars cheat. Scholars play the con. Now, is this a humanistic fact or a self-righteous fiction?
We know we lie and cheat and play the con on ourselves as well as others, but we are not scholars so we are excused for being human. We expect scholars like our priests to be above reproach, but they are not; indeed, neither are the religious. We are all prisoners of our society's mind, and that mind not only condones lying and cheating and playing the con, but also continuously invents new imaginative ways to exercise the propensity.
Scholars cheat because many are involved in research that they know beforehand is pointless, valueless and meaningless, and like hundreds of studies done before. So, why do these scholars write for grants to attempt research the character of which is inconsistent with their personal and professional code of ethics?
Scholars cheat for the same reasons that we do. They cheat to keep the wolf from the door. They cheap because the academic freedom they purport to enjoy does not in fact exist. They operate in a managed environment of compromise and trade offs: from "publish or perish" to the seductive possibility of tenure. This is not unlike the larger environment that embraces us all.
And like us, the majority of the academic community is docile, timid, tentative, yielding, unimaginative, protective, security conscious, afraid, mechanistic and unoriginal. It is the mindset that permeates our society, so why shouldn't it penetrate the ivory towers of academia?
Academics are also petty because they are powerless; slaves to the norm and obsessively driven to replicate these norms, while giving off the impression to the contrary. They are not only non-thinkers like most of us they are non-leaders as well. They are our mirror image, and not protectors of the lamp of Diogenes that we fantasize.
Where they differ with most of us is that they can cover their deceptions in a sea of words, or hide their illusions in an ocean of statistics, which fortifies the academic "I" from the societal "we" intended to be served. The greater the separation of academia from the wider community the more pronounced the conflict between them. If one community is sick can the other community be well?
This cognitive dissonance is buried in what Leon Festinger (1957) described as cognitive consistency. We change things around, whatever we experience, to fit with what we perceive to be true no matter how outrageous the discrepancy. We are motivated to achieve consistency between our attitudes and behavior. When it does not exist, our minds make the adjustment to make it so.
When someone says we have a twisted brain, they are not talking out of church. We all do. Unbeknownst to us, our brains -- vain, emotional, immoral, deluded, pigheaded, secretive, weak-willed, and bigoted -- push and pull, twist and warp our perceptions of reality.
The scholar prides himself in his objectivity, his value-free conscience, his integrity, and open mindedness. He sees himself as a high priest pursuing research above the banality and carnality of society. He cannot accept academia being a reflection and pawn of society, and so he denies it emotionally and intellectually, hard evidence be damned! He cannot accept it; therefore, it does not exist.
Consequently, the behavioral scientist in particular and the social scientist in general has equated proliferation with profundity and methodology with meaning. He can describe society's dilemma in impressive terms, but has failed to move society one iota closer to resolution of its conflicts. He has had little success in explaining why we lie, cheat, and steal from ourselves, much less make us less so inclined. He can define populations but not divine behavior. He is an artist of methodology and paradigms attempting to be scientist. He represents a discipline in search of a philosophy.
Fifty (50) percent of the world's psychologists and seventy-five (75) percent of the world's sociologists work in the United States. They were given the body of America as patient in the 1960s to study. What single contribution did their collective genius produce?
They developed a new lexicon and new expressions such as "fail safe," and "one man one vote," and "Medicare," "Megadeath," and "lifestyle," and "black humor," and "elephant jokes," and "God is dead" (Nietzsche style), and "non-books."
They also came up with "soul," and "open housing," and "Marshall McLuhan," and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf," and "Thalidomide," and "cross-busing," and "cluster development," and "white backlash," and "multiversity," and "super star," and "Super Bowl."
They had no trouble mentioning in the same breath "White Paper," and "Black Power," and "New Math," and "Sit-ins," and "de facto segregation," and "ad hoc committees," and "Black studies," and of course, war.
James Reston wrote: "No nation ever fought such a vicious war (Viet Nam) in the midst of such sacrifice by some of its people and so little sacrifice by the rest."
Of course scholars were too busy to note the import of these words, as they were congratulating themselves with the panache of James V. McConnell, who proclaimed:
"I believe that the day has come when we can combine sensory deprivation with drugs, hypnosis and astute manipulation of reward and punishment to gain absolute control over an individual's behavior."
McConnell is not alone. Behaviorists, without affirmation, have for the past four decades held the heady belief that people can be molded by simply deciding how they should be molded and then manipulating their behavior to that criteria, as if man were a laboratory mouse.
Scholars have been given the exalting role of society's thinkers, a role the rest of society relinquishes with a sigh of relief.
Scholarship, or the product scholars produce, is accepted unequivocally as the blueprint of wisdom and master plan of good sense. Little note is taken of the lack of originality, spark of wisdom, or pinch of sense.
Society accepts their prescriptions as the remedies it is looking for, even if their formulae later prove to be killers. Fortunately, most of their prescriptions have the innocuous consistency of placebos. Still, the danger exists because they are trusted without qualification, making society vulnerable to their hubris and excess.
Scholars have the comfort of hieroglyphic speak in that laymen fail to have access to their technical shorthand. One need only spend an hour in a university library perusing the journals of scholars to see how much this is so. They insulate themselves from the vernacular hiding their frustration in a glib rhetorical style accompanied by grids and graphs, schematics and statistics that conveniently bury the definition of the problem in the blur. The non-scholar reader expects to be so impressed by this obfuscation that he takes solace that better minds than his are so employed. This is obvious in social and behavioral research, but is equally true in the hard sciences as well.
Once advanced training in a discipline earns an MA, MS, or Ph.D., the holder has a license to play his con on society as a bona fide scholar with credentials the equivalent to credibility. It matters little if his frame of reference, his problem design, his creative verve, and the legitimacy of his research is without merit. As long as hieroglyphic speak resonates with his interlocutors, he is journal bound to take up space in some university library masquerading as profundity.
Ivan Illich in "Deschooling Society" (1970) saw education a farce with a societal revolution fragmenting the bond of trust between scholars and laymen. He recommended nothing less than radical surgery:
"In a school society, we have come to rely more and more on the professional judgment of the educators on the effect of their own work in order to decide whom we can or cannot trust; we go to the doctor, lawyer, or psychologist because we trust that anybody with the required amount of specialized educational treatment by other colleagues deserves our confidence. In a deschooled society, professionals could no longer claim the trust of their clients on the basis of their curricular pedigree, or ensure their standing by simply referring their clients to other professionals who approved of their schooling."
Instead of placing trust in scholars and professionals, it would be prudent, according to Illich, to place that same trust in the judgment of the client himself. This would mean, of course, turning society completely upside-down, and inside-out.
Imagine judging thought on the basis of the thinking and not on the basis of the pedigree of the thinker. It would put the onus on each of us to involve ourselves in the process of making judgments, and not leave that confidence up to an outsider. Perish the thought, we would have to do our own thinking. We could no longer take comfort in being prisoners of the mind. We could no longer skip thinking to the shorthand of stereotypical answers to all our problems: that is, seeing farmers as "rednecks" and blacks as "lazy," and Jews "as all rich," and men "as strong" and women "as weak."
Bias would perish from our vocabulary. Gone would be the luxury of generalizing about the motivation of the youth culture, or the disposition of old age, as we would base all on our direct experience and consideration. We would have to know our own mind to cease to be prisoners of everyone else's.
* * * * * *
19. Phil Brown (editor), Radical Psychology, Colophon Books, Harper & Row, New York, 1973.
20. "Corruption in the U.S.: Do they all do it?" Time Magazine, December 31, 1973.
21. Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man, Free Press, New York, 1971.
22. Everett L. Shostrom, Man, the Manipulator, Abingdon Press, New York, 1967.
23. Ibid, Brown.
24. Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford University Press, 1957.
25. James Reston, The New York Times, February 17, 1968.
26. James V. McConnell, Time Magazine, April 2, 1973.
27. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, Harper & Row, New York, 1970.
PRISONER OF THE MIND
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2007
"Psychological manipulation pervades all areas of society, not only through the use of skills and techniques, but through the conveyance of oppressive behavior to the oppressed themselves, and through the use of psychology as an ideology for the defense of the status quo."
Phil Brown (1973)
There is a reluctance to focus on the question: is society sick?
This is not only a problem for professional thinkers but also for laymen. There is a kind of normalcy to the idea that society is sick and people are sick in society. So what?
The frenetic pace of society, the compulsive waste making, the robbing Peter to pay Paul, the planning for planning sake, the living without consequence, the lifestyle diseases, the looking for miraculous drugs to cure addictions, hey, what's all the fuss about? It's the way it is! But is it? And if so, why is it?
We are told we are a nation of believers in God but that doesn't include going to church. We are told we are a religious and caring nation, but that doesn't include knowing and fraternizing with our neighbors next door.
The religion of the West is imbued with the idea of God and the individual as infinitely precious and irreducibly real for his having an immortal soul. Yet, the history of carnage in the West, and violent crime in the United States, contradicts this perception. Thinking and behaving are worlds apart.
Churches are constructed as houses of worship, but have become increasingly empty of worshipers, as modern society has moved away from religious doctrine to empirical dogma.
In Freudian speak, religion once kept the "lid on the Id," but no longer. The moral highway has no speed limits, no consensus rules of the road, and so crashes have become the symphony of the times. We lost 55,000 Americans in the Viet Nam War. We lose that many every year on American highways as a gauge of this reckless carnage and despair.
The Id is running rampant, as there is no Superego in evidence.
The paradox is that everything is set on the rational while everyone is lost in the wilderness of the irrational. Incest and murder, corruption and malfeasance, and coveting the neighbor's wife and property have become banner headlines. We have lost our way. Even being nice has been replaced by being with it.
The idea of the immortal soul has been superseded by the idea of the individual personality, which is not immortal but all the more precious for not being so. Identity and role relationships have become the new psychology. The irony is that psychology rose out of philosophy and has never found its own identity much less its role. So, rather than create that role, it continues to search for it.
The evidence is demonstrated as psychology develops a new branch every time a perplexing problem surfaces. Currently, we have existential psychology, which rises out of a philosophy that is as obtuse as it is absurd, and humanistic psychology, which attempts to be everything to everybody. The clergy, desperate for survival, grab these new psychologies as if long lost relatives, accepting their dogma, and incorporating them into their sermons as if pure gravitas.
In this new age of the idea of the individual, we measure a person's worth not by his bond, or what he has done, but what he can become. It is the philosophy of "wait until next year."
His worth is a measure of his presence, or how good an actor he is. The more he can shock us to attention the more vivid he is. We see him making his mark as an artist, scientist, businessman or entertainer, not on the strength of his performance, but on future promise. He is phantom we have created chasing shadows, but we don't care as long as he is interesting.
I use the word "phantom" in the Buddhist sense. The Buddhist would read the careerist's resume, curriculum vitae, or biography as the preferred picture in the individual's mind. Picture is not a person, but a touched up portrait removed of blemishes. This makes the individual appear near perfect if unreal, while treating that phantom world as real.
This has created the current mirage in which, seemingly, we all look alike, dress alike, speak alike, think alike, and behave alike as if we have no identity at all, or as if our shadow is real and we are not.
This persistence of memory is buttressed with our programmed conformity. We like to think we are different because we have a given and surname and are told we have an individual self. This fails to refute the fact that we are a society of sleepwalkers addressing each other within this dream of selfhood.
All our ideas of morality and obligation, blame and praise are based on this dream and serve only to strengthen the illusion of its reality.
In this age of manipulation, what Everett Shostrom (1967) calls our obsession with thingness; we delight in playing the fraud on ourselves to disguise our false consciousness. Phil Brown writes:
"Industrial psychologists make factory workers more comfortable, but only in ways to sap their militancy and thus insure corporate profit; fancy lounges and counseling services are traded off for speed ups of the assembly line. Advertising psychologists aid the corporations on the opposite end by brainwashing people into consuming harmful and/or meaningless products. School psychologists push working class children into vocational tracks, while placing middle strata children into academic tracks. Military psychologists polish the machinery of U S imperialism providing adjustment for antiwar GI's. Social psychologists perform research for counter insurgency plans and racial inequality. IQ research by men such as Jensen and Herrstein not only provides the ruling class's answer to black struggles for freedom, but also provides the rational basis for repression since it is scientific."
Erasmus would see the folly in all this, but these people are dead serious and they are playing with people's minds. Time (December 31, 1973) sees this as a new definition of corruption where money may not be involved but the way people are perceived and treated is.
There is an up and down war that constantly goes on in the social and behavioral sciences. Experimental psychologists who play with mice all day pride themselves on their rigorous research designs. They put down sociologists because they have less precise methodologies, and have been known to speculate about their findings. Both psychologists and sociologists put down anthropologists because they seldom use statistical analysis in their value-laden case studies. Political scientists, historians and geographers are even held in less repute.
Should anyone take a side road into philosophical speculation, he is likely never to be invited back. He has committed the cardinal sin of becoming an interdisciplinarian, venturing outside the sacred walls of his discipline and contaminating himself with culture. Ernest Becker took this plunge in "The Birth and Death of Meaning" (1971) never again to be considered comfortable by his colleagues.
George Bernard Shaw was fond to remind us that the virtues we hold dear to our hearts have a price tag on them. Shaw asked an elegant lady of society if she would go to bed with him for 20,000 British pounds. She replied, "But of course, silly, who wouldn't?" Then Shaw parried, "Would you go to bed with me for five pounds?" Indignantly, the lady said, "I most certainly wouldn't," then added, "what kind of a woman do you think I am?" To which Shaw rejoined, "We already know that, now don't we? We're just trying to determine your price range."
The games scholars play is not unlike the game we all play. Scholars lie. Scholars cheat. Scholars play the con. Now, is this a humanistic fact or a self-righteous fiction?
We know we lie and cheat and play the con on ourselves as well as others, but we are not scholars so we are excused for being human. We expect scholars like our priests to be above reproach, but they are not; indeed, neither are the religious. We are all prisoners of our society's mind, and that mind not only condones lying and cheating and playing the con, but also continuously invents new imaginative ways to exercise the propensity.
Scholars cheat because many are involved in research that they know beforehand is pointless, valueless and meaningless, and like hundreds of studies done before. So, why do these scholars write for grants to attempt research the character of which is inconsistent with their personal and professional code of ethics?
Scholars cheat for the same reasons that we do. They cheat to keep the wolf from the door. They cheap because the academic freedom they purport to enjoy does not in fact exist. They operate in a managed environment of compromise and trade offs: from "publish or perish" to the seductive possibility of tenure. This is not unlike the larger environment that embraces us all.
And like us, the majority of the academic community is docile, timid, tentative, yielding, unimaginative, protective, security conscious, afraid, mechanistic and unoriginal. It is the mindset that permeates our society, so why shouldn't it penetrate the ivory towers of academia?
Academics are also petty because they are powerless; slaves to the norm and obsessively driven to replicate these norms, while giving off the impression to the contrary. They are not only non-thinkers like most of us they are non-leaders as well. They are our mirror image, and not protectors of the lamp of Diogenes that we fantasize.
Where they differ with most of us is that they can cover their deceptions in a sea of words, or hide their illusions in an ocean of statistics, which fortifies the academic "I" from the societal "we" intended to be served. The greater the separation of academia from the wider community the more pronounced the conflict between them. If one community is sick can the other community be well?
This cognitive dissonance is buried in what Leon Festinger (1957) described as cognitive consistency. We change things around, whatever we experience, to fit with what we perceive to be true no matter how outrageous the discrepancy. We are motivated to achieve consistency between our attitudes and behavior. When it does not exist, our minds make the adjustment to make it so.
When someone says we have a twisted brain, they are not talking out of church. We all do. Unbeknownst to us, our brains -- vain, emotional, immoral, deluded, pigheaded, secretive, weak-willed, and bigoted -- push and pull, twist and warp our perceptions of reality.
The scholar prides himself in his objectivity, his value-free conscience, his integrity, and open mindedness. He sees himself as a high priest pursuing research above the banality and carnality of society. He cannot accept academia being a reflection and pawn of society, and so he denies it emotionally and intellectually, hard evidence be damned! He cannot accept it; therefore, it does not exist.
Consequently, the behavioral scientist in particular and the social scientist in general has equated proliferation with profundity and methodology with meaning. He can describe society's dilemma in impressive terms, but has failed to move society one iota closer to resolution of its conflicts. He has had little success in explaining why we lie, cheat, and steal from ourselves, much less make us less so inclined. He can define populations but not divine behavior. He is an artist of methodology and paradigms attempting to be scientist. He represents a discipline in search of a philosophy.
Fifty (50) percent of the world's psychologists and seventy-five (75) percent of the world's sociologists work in the United States. They were given the body of America as patient in the 1960s to study. What single contribution did their collective genius produce?
They developed a new lexicon and new expressions such as "fail safe," and "one man one vote," and "Medicare," "Megadeath," and "lifestyle," and "black humor," and "elephant jokes," and "God is dead" (Nietzsche style), and "non-books."
They also came up with "soul," and "open housing," and "Marshall McLuhan," and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf," and "Thalidomide," and "cross-busing," and "cluster development," and "white backlash," and "multiversity," and "super star," and "Super Bowl."
They had no trouble mentioning in the same breath "White Paper," and "Black Power," and "New Math," and "Sit-ins," and "de facto segregation," and "ad hoc committees," and "Black studies," and of course, war.
James Reston wrote: "No nation ever fought such a vicious war (Viet Nam) in the midst of such sacrifice by some of its people and so little sacrifice by the rest."
Of course scholars were too busy to note the import of these words, as they were congratulating themselves with the panache of James V. McConnell, who proclaimed:
"I believe that the day has come when we can combine sensory deprivation with drugs, hypnosis and astute manipulation of reward and punishment to gain absolute control over an individual's behavior."
McConnell is not alone. Behaviorists, without affirmation, have for the past four decades held the heady belief that people can be molded by simply deciding how they should be molded and then manipulating their behavior to that criteria, as if man were a laboratory mouse.
Scholars have been given the exalting role of society's thinkers, a role the rest of society relinquishes with a sigh of relief.
Scholarship, or the product scholars produce, is accepted unequivocally as the blueprint of wisdom and master plan of good sense. Little note is taken of the lack of originality, spark of wisdom, or pinch of sense.
Society accepts their prescriptions as the remedies it is looking for, even if their formulae later prove to be killers. Fortunately, most of their prescriptions have the innocuous consistency of placebos. Still, the danger exists because they are trusted without qualification, making society vulnerable to their hubris and excess.
Scholars have the comfort of hieroglyphic speak in that laymen fail to have access to their technical shorthand. One need only spend an hour in a university library perusing the journals of scholars to see how much this is so. They insulate themselves from the vernacular hiding their frustration in a glib rhetorical style accompanied by grids and graphs, schematics and statistics that conveniently bury the definition of the problem in the blur. The non-scholar reader expects to be so impressed by this obfuscation that he takes solace that better minds than his are so employed. This is obvious in social and behavioral research, but is equally true in the hard sciences as well.
Once advanced training in a discipline earns an MA, MS, or Ph.D., the holder has a license to play his con on society as a bona fide scholar with credentials the equivalent to credibility. It matters little if his frame of reference, his problem design, his creative verve, and the legitimacy of his research is without merit. As long as hieroglyphic speak resonates with his interlocutors, he is journal bound to take up space in some university library masquerading as profundity.
Ivan Illich in "Deschooling Society" (1970) saw education a farce with a societal revolution fragmenting the bond of trust between scholars and laymen. He recommended nothing less than radical surgery:
"In a school society, we have come to rely more and more on the professional judgment of the educators on the effect of their own work in order to decide whom we can or cannot trust; we go to the doctor, lawyer, or psychologist because we trust that anybody with the required amount of specialized educational treatment by other colleagues deserves our confidence. In a deschooled society, professionals could no longer claim the trust of their clients on the basis of their curricular pedigree, or ensure their standing by simply referring their clients to other professionals who approved of their schooling."
Instead of placing trust in scholars and professionals, it would be prudent, according to Illich, to place that same trust in the judgment of the client himself. This would mean, of course, turning society completely upside-down, and inside-out.
Imagine judging thought on the basis of the thinking and not on the basis of the pedigree of the thinker. It would put the onus on each of us to involve ourselves in the process of making judgments, and not leave that confidence up to an outsider. Perish the thought, we would have to do our own thinking. We could no longer take comfort in being prisoners of the mind. We could no longer skip thinking to the shorthand of stereotypical answers to all our problems: that is, seeing farmers as "rednecks" and blacks as "lazy," and Jews "as all rich," and men "as strong" and women "as weak."
Bias would perish from our vocabulary. Gone would be the luxury of generalizing about the motivation of the youth culture, or the disposition of old age, as we would base all on our direct experience and consideration. We would have to know our own mind to cease to be prisoners of everyone else's.
* * * * * *
19. Phil Brown (editor), Radical Psychology, Colophon Books, Harper & Row, New York, 1973.
20. "Corruption in the U.S.: Do they all do it?" Time Magazine, December 31, 1973.
21. Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man, Free Press, New York, 1971.
22. Everett L. Shostrom, Man, the Manipulator, Abingdon Press, New York, 1967.
23. Ibid, Brown.
24. Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford University Press, 1957.
25. James Reston, The New York Times, February 17, 1968.
26. James V. McConnell, Time Magazine, April 2, 1973.
27. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, Harper & Row, New York, 1970.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
CORPOCRACY: THE BANALITY OF CORRUPTION
CORPOCRACY: THE BANALITY OF CORRUPTION
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2007
“Corrupt influence is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality, and of all disorder; it loads us more than millions of debt; takes away vigor from our arms, wisdom from our councils, and every shadow of authority and credit from the most venerable parts of our constitution.”
Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797)
English Statesman
I wrote “Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers” (2000), hoping to get the attention of corporate executives and professional workers that I failed to get with “Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge” (1998), by offering an analysis and blueprint of recovery.
It has since become apparent to me that great crimes do not come from terrible ideas. The worst atrocities rise from the simplest of vices. And few vices are more vicious than careerism. The corporation is a career. The United States is built on careerism.
The pyramid climber has a job with a daily routine. It has its ups and downs, but no matter how immoral or intrusive the work may be on a market, or competitor, or culture, it is work. If it is work that has to be done, people have to be hired and paid. To be done well, they must be supervised and promoted. Morality never enters the equation.
The pyramid climber is a careerist of the first order. He has no motive other than to be promoted, demonstrating extraordinary diligence in looking out for such personal advancement. He joined the company, not to make a difference, but saw it as an opportunity to start from scratch and still make a career. The only thing a pyramid climber believes in fervently is success.
The peculiar nature of success, differing with the popular belief being measured by money, is in fact a matter of inclusion. The pyramid climber will pine away if not invited to lunch by those that count.
Parallel to the world of the pyramid climber is that of the technocrat. The technocrat is a thoughtless follower of rules who can cite the page, chapter and book of the policy manual without apprehending its essence.
The technocrat is a passive instrument of corpocracy; the careerist is the architect of his own advance. The first loses himself in computer printouts; the second hoists himself up the corporate ladder, rung by rung, filling all the boxes with the appropriate curriculum vitae information. The first is how the organization sees its minions; the second is how they actually are.
Those who theorize about organization consider ambition and careerism as checks against rather than conduits to entropy. Yet, careerists and technocrats manage to drain the organization of its energy and spirit. This is so because corpocracy no longer cares about having an authentic existence, much less sponsoring careerism, and thus it destroys individuals who do.
There is a remarkable sameness to the twenty-first century organization that preys on the dissolution of discrete functions and establishes hierarchies of cyberspace, or dissolves those that remain into a shapeless bureaucracy that more resembles an onion than a pyramid.
The main reason this banality is evaded is that a critique of careerism would force a confrontation with the corrupting soul of the dominant ethos of our times, capitalism. At a time when capitalism is assumed to be not only efficient, but also a source of freedom and enterprise, the careerist seems like the agent of an easy-going tolerance and pluralism.
Unlike the idealist, whose great sin is to think too much, ask too many embarrassing questions, while demonstrating no reluctance to be confrontational and wanting the leadership to lead, the careerist is a genial caretaker of himself desiring only to be seen as a safe hire. He prefers the marketplace to the corridors of conscience, considering himself a realist and pragmatic; not utopian or fanatic.
Yet, the careerist may be as lethal as the idealist, as his ambition is an adjunct to his barbarism. Some of the worst crimes in corpocracy are the result of ordinary vices rather than extraordinary ideas. These I have described in the two books mentioned above: passive aggression; passive defensive; passive responsive; approach avoidance; obsessive compulsive; and malicious obedience.
These behaviors are not the result of draconian measures against employees as a group, but the result of the liquidation of the person as an individual. There is great pressure, both subtle and obvious to produce a mass organizational society, which has its history in the movement in the industrial period from workers being craftsmen to being interchangeable parts in the industrial machine. When professionals came into the picture in the last quarter century, the culture and methodology were so firmly established that it could not be reconciled to the new challenges. Without a sphere of influence or a social stratum, corpocracy has come to denote a pathological orientation of the self.
Corpocracy members work for a paycheck with little or no concern for their well being or the survival of the organization, as they have no beliefs, sense of community, or individual identity. They are takers, not givers. Stripped of their essence as individuals, this has brought on a sense of anxiety and loneliness surrounded by hundreds and sometimes even thousands of other workers. They have a sense of being in the organization but not belonging to it. They have literally subsumed themselves to an existence that insists on absolute loyalty and unconditional obedience, while promoting a sense of structure and belonging to fill the need. Company policy reinforces this grip.
Corpocracy has used an ideology of straitjacket logic to relieve workers of the freedom to think and the capacity to create by making work dull, routine, and essentially a fictitious world where anxious men could feel at home even at the cost of their identity. Laptops, iPods, BlackBerrys, et al, have only added to this fiction.
With the banality of corruption, we can ignore the distribution of power: in corpocracy, there is only a desert of anomie. We can disregard grievances: they only conceal a deeper vein of psychic discontent. Strangest of all, we need not worry about moral responsibility and accountability because workers have become automatons incapable of judgment or being judged.
The drift of corpocracy, cutting through the rhetoric, is evident in that there is a supreme disregard for immediate consequences at all levels rather than any display of draconian ruthlessness. There is rootlessness and neglect of company interests by workers rather than insurgent sabotage. There is contempt for practical motives rather than blatant self-interests. And there is unwavering faith, despite it all, that the company will survive with its ideological fictitious view rather than a lust for power.
The main constituency of American capitalism is the corporation. It has revived the most toxic elements and folded their ethos into the rhetoric of security and employee rights, but with intrusion into the family and personal privacy. This reflects a general desire to dissolve the public and private into one at the expense of the employee but to the benefit of the employer. Actually, it has been to their mutual disadvantage. Employers don’t want to give up control, and so workers are counter dependent on them for their well being. Workers in such dependency bring their bodies to work and leave their minds at home, doing as little as possible to get by, not as much as they are capable of doing. It is a vicious circle of chaos and resentment.
Capitalism’s most important product is progress with the impulse for expansion for expansions sake, bigger always being seen as better. Capitalism provides a model, not a motive for the venture capitalist, who patterns the acquisition of power on the basis of the accumulated capital. The capitalist sees money as a means to more money. The venture capitalist sees every conquest as a way station to the next. Few developments have bred more cynicism and contempt for work as an expression of life fulfillment than this double standard.
So what? It is time to review instead of reify our system and consider how best to go forward. This is written in this interest and for no other reason.
* * * * * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
6714 Jennifer Drive
Temple Terrace, FL 33617-2504
Phone/Fax: (813) 989 - 3631
Email address: thedeltagrpfl@cs.com
Cell Phone: none
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2007
“Corrupt influence is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality, and of all disorder; it loads us more than millions of debt; takes away vigor from our arms, wisdom from our councils, and every shadow of authority and credit from the most venerable parts of our constitution.”
Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797)
English Statesman
I wrote “Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers” (2000), hoping to get the attention of corporate executives and professional workers that I failed to get with “Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge” (1998), by offering an analysis and blueprint of recovery.
It has since become apparent to me that great crimes do not come from terrible ideas. The worst atrocities rise from the simplest of vices. And few vices are more vicious than careerism. The corporation is a career. The United States is built on careerism.
The pyramid climber has a job with a daily routine. It has its ups and downs, but no matter how immoral or intrusive the work may be on a market, or competitor, or culture, it is work. If it is work that has to be done, people have to be hired and paid. To be done well, they must be supervised and promoted. Morality never enters the equation.
The pyramid climber is a careerist of the first order. He has no motive other than to be promoted, demonstrating extraordinary diligence in looking out for such personal advancement. He joined the company, not to make a difference, but saw it as an opportunity to start from scratch and still make a career. The only thing a pyramid climber believes in fervently is success.
The peculiar nature of success, differing with the popular belief being measured by money, is in fact a matter of inclusion. The pyramid climber will pine away if not invited to lunch by those that count.
Parallel to the world of the pyramid climber is that of the technocrat. The technocrat is a thoughtless follower of rules who can cite the page, chapter and book of the policy manual without apprehending its essence.
The technocrat is a passive instrument of corpocracy; the careerist is the architect of his own advance. The first loses himself in computer printouts; the second hoists himself up the corporate ladder, rung by rung, filling all the boxes with the appropriate curriculum vitae information. The first is how the organization sees its minions; the second is how they actually are.
Those who theorize about organization consider ambition and careerism as checks against rather than conduits to entropy. Yet, careerists and technocrats manage to drain the organization of its energy and spirit. This is so because corpocracy no longer cares about having an authentic existence, much less sponsoring careerism, and thus it destroys individuals who do.
There is a remarkable sameness to the twenty-first century organization that preys on the dissolution of discrete functions and establishes hierarchies of cyberspace, or dissolves those that remain into a shapeless bureaucracy that more resembles an onion than a pyramid.
The main reason this banality is evaded is that a critique of careerism would force a confrontation with the corrupting soul of the dominant ethos of our times, capitalism. At a time when capitalism is assumed to be not only efficient, but also a source of freedom and enterprise, the careerist seems like the agent of an easy-going tolerance and pluralism.
Unlike the idealist, whose great sin is to think too much, ask too many embarrassing questions, while demonstrating no reluctance to be confrontational and wanting the leadership to lead, the careerist is a genial caretaker of himself desiring only to be seen as a safe hire. He prefers the marketplace to the corridors of conscience, considering himself a realist and pragmatic; not utopian or fanatic.
Yet, the careerist may be as lethal as the idealist, as his ambition is an adjunct to his barbarism. Some of the worst crimes in corpocracy are the result of ordinary vices rather than extraordinary ideas. These I have described in the two books mentioned above: passive aggression; passive defensive; passive responsive; approach avoidance; obsessive compulsive; and malicious obedience.
These behaviors are not the result of draconian measures against employees as a group, but the result of the liquidation of the person as an individual. There is great pressure, both subtle and obvious to produce a mass organizational society, which has its history in the movement in the industrial period from workers being craftsmen to being interchangeable parts in the industrial machine. When professionals came into the picture in the last quarter century, the culture and methodology were so firmly established that it could not be reconciled to the new challenges. Without a sphere of influence or a social stratum, corpocracy has come to denote a pathological orientation of the self.
Corpocracy members work for a paycheck with little or no concern for their well being or the survival of the organization, as they have no beliefs, sense of community, or individual identity. They are takers, not givers. Stripped of their essence as individuals, this has brought on a sense of anxiety and loneliness surrounded by hundreds and sometimes even thousands of other workers. They have a sense of being in the organization but not belonging to it. They have literally subsumed themselves to an existence that insists on absolute loyalty and unconditional obedience, while promoting a sense of structure and belonging to fill the need. Company policy reinforces this grip.
Corpocracy has used an ideology of straitjacket logic to relieve workers of the freedom to think and the capacity to create by making work dull, routine, and essentially a fictitious world where anxious men could feel at home even at the cost of their identity. Laptops, iPods, BlackBerrys, et al, have only added to this fiction.
With the banality of corruption, we can ignore the distribution of power: in corpocracy, there is only a desert of anomie. We can disregard grievances: they only conceal a deeper vein of psychic discontent. Strangest of all, we need not worry about moral responsibility and accountability because workers have become automatons incapable of judgment or being judged.
The drift of corpocracy, cutting through the rhetoric, is evident in that there is a supreme disregard for immediate consequences at all levels rather than any display of draconian ruthlessness. There is rootlessness and neglect of company interests by workers rather than insurgent sabotage. There is contempt for practical motives rather than blatant self-interests. And there is unwavering faith, despite it all, that the company will survive with its ideological fictitious view rather than a lust for power.
The main constituency of American capitalism is the corporation. It has revived the most toxic elements and folded their ethos into the rhetoric of security and employee rights, but with intrusion into the family and personal privacy. This reflects a general desire to dissolve the public and private into one at the expense of the employee but to the benefit of the employer. Actually, it has been to their mutual disadvantage. Employers don’t want to give up control, and so workers are counter dependent on them for their well being. Workers in such dependency bring their bodies to work and leave their minds at home, doing as little as possible to get by, not as much as they are capable of doing. It is a vicious circle of chaos and resentment.
Capitalism’s most important product is progress with the impulse for expansion for expansions sake, bigger always being seen as better. Capitalism provides a model, not a motive for the venture capitalist, who patterns the acquisition of power on the basis of the accumulated capital. The capitalist sees money as a means to more money. The venture capitalist sees every conquest as a way station to the next. Few developments have bred more cynicism and contempt for work as an expression of life fulfillment than this double standard.
So what? It is time to review instead of reify our system and consider how best to go forward. This is written in this interest and for no other reason.
* * * * * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
6714 Jennifer Drive
Temple Terrace, FL 33617-2504
Phone/Fax: (813) 989 - 3631
Email address: thedeltagrpfl@cs.com
Cell Phone: none
Friday, January 05, 2007
IS SOCIETY SICK? PART II THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY
Part II
THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2007
“We have been taught to neglect, despise, and violate our bodies, and to put all faith in our brains. Indeed, the special disease of civilized man might be described as a block or schism between his brain (specifically, the cortex) and the rest of his body. This corresponds to the split between the ‘I’ and ‘me,’ man and nature, and to the confusion of Ouroboros (Greek word means "tail swallower") the mixed up snake, who does not know that his tail belongs with his head. We have allowed brain thinking to develop and dominate our lives out of all proportion to instinctual wisdom, which we are allowing to slump into atrophy.”
Alan W. Watts
British Philosopher
The conflict does not end with this obsession with roots and security. It actually begins here as our brains war with our bodies. We see it all around us. The brain desires food and pleasure and comfort or things that the body does not want. The brain gives the body directions it will not follow. And the body gives the brain impulses it does not understand.
This has manifested itself as a double bind between personal integrity and security; between contentment and anxiety. It prompted Samuel Warner (1966) to depict this conflict as a war between self-realization and self-defeat. Gregory Bateson (1972) it this way:
A double bind is a situation in which an individual feels they are receiving contradictory messages from a highly significant person, which result inconsistent and sometimes disruptive behavior.
So, it is an intra-war (between the brain and the body) and also an inter-war (between authority givers and receivers). I worked in an organization in which managers were asked to take a voluntary pay cut up to twenty percent, which they believed was to save the company. It puzzled them greatly, however, when the annual report came out showing that senior managers across the board were given twenty percent bonuses.
It is so easy to forget that we are animals. When we compare human with animal desire, we find many extraordinary differences. The animal tends to eat with his stomach, and the man with his brain. When the animal’s stomach is full, it stops eating, but the man is never sure when to stop so he keeps on eating. When he has eaten as much as his stomach can take, he still feels empty.
Depression, loneliness, and lack of esteem or many other shades of self-deception may feed the mind’s sense of emptiness. So, he eats on for compensatory gratification.
This is largely due to anxiety, to the knowledge that a constant supply of food is uncertain. I watched a man grow from 200 pounds on a six-foot frame to over 400, as an adult. Seemingly, he could never get enough food to satisfy his psychological need. He had nearly starved to death as a small boy as his prostitute mother left him alone for days without food with all the doors locked. He eventually contracted diabetes in his mature years, and died in his fifties.
In the uncertain world of constant war, where instability and insecurity plague the conscience, pleasure is uncertain, which feeds a compulsion to take pleasure where we find it.
We stimulate our sense organs with food and drink, cigarettes and booze, or advertisers stimulate them for us, to the point that our organs become insensitive. Then we look beyond simple pleasures to the surreal world of drugs, brutal sports, and the craziness of death-defying stunts.
The brain is in pursuit of happiness. Because it is much more concerned about the future than the present, it conceives happiness as the guarantee to a pleasure filled life. Yet, the brain knows that a life of pleasure is of limited duration. So it attempts to cram as much pleasure as possible into the span of a few years, burning the candle at both ends with the mindset, “you’re only young once!”
Modern society has invented this self-destructive vicious circle as it refuses to live in the present clamoring always for the future to unfold. It is no accident that slogan writers created the General Electric catch phrase, “Progress is our most important product,” as progress denotes the future. This translates into the pursuit of more, always better, finer, more convenient, and more pleasurable. Ironically, this slogan condemns us all to a life of perpetual frustration.
Consequently, we are vulnerable to anyone who has a future oriented gadget. For years, it was limited to those that occupied the occult world and trafficked in innocuous fantasies. Now, the occult has become mainstream in futuristic proclamations of physical scientists, medical professionals, and enterprising technologists with the promise of bionic man, and a universe of robotics and Dick Tracy contraptions.
If but one of these contraptions touches our uncertainties, or forgives an excess, we will line up to buy its color, composition and construction without a moment’s reflection. Even this is not enough; we must make heroes of these creators, as they provide a pause in our all out war with our real and imagined enemies. They give us an opportunity to breathe a sigh of relief for not having to deal with our problems.
Patent medicine is a television dinner of the mind. Yet, in fairness, is it not necessary in this busy-busy, dog-eat-dog world we have created? Who has time to solve their problems anyway? We are too busy living for the future to pay attention to the present.
The future, of course, is an abstraction, a rational inference from experience, which exists only in the mind. Primary consciousness of the basic mind knows reality, but does not know the future. It lives completely in the present and is capable of perceiving only “what is,” or the moment.
The brain, however, retains memory and by using it is able to make predictions. These predictions vary from reliable (everyone will eventually die) to fanciful (anyone can become president). Watts (1951) saw this clearly leaving us with this consideration:
“The future is still not here, and cannot become a part of experienced reality until it is present. Since what we know of the future is made up of purely abstract and logical elements – inferences, guesses, deductions – it cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, seen, heard, or otherwise enjoyed. To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead. This is why all the affairs of civilization are rushed, why hardly anyone enjoys what he has, and is forever seeking more and more. Happiness, then, will consist, not of solid and substantial realities, but of such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes, and assurances.”
We see this futuristic psychobabble in the language of humanists, which is hyphenated with such words as reinforcement, satisfiers, trade offs and hygiene factors.
At first glance, it would appear we have no trouble being prisoners of someone else’s mind, a mind that would gather all our loose ends and doubts, package them, and tie them neatly together into a bundle of security.
This is revealed in the con we play on ourselves. We accept the pabulum of experts and the promise of security because we don’t want to change. We want to believe experts can protect us from insecurity and our fears, real and imagined, that threaten us. But even a kidder can kid himself only so long. Time runs out and reality sets in on these proffered myths that we can be healthy, wealthy and wise without changing the fluidity of our universe. Eventually, it seeps into the fissures of our brain that what is not earned is not learned.
Freud traced the problem of insecurity to the repression and suppression of the libido. There is little evidence today in this era of “make love, not war” that much repression and suppression exists. Still, insecurity reigns supreme in every quadrant of society.
We have gotten rid of Victorian and Puritanical double standards, yet man is still not at peace with his nature. Now that sex has come out of the closet it would appear that with all the research, educational programs, and the dissemination of information, sex education has gone awry of its intended purpose. Instead of blissful contentment, it has created the most permissive climate in Western society’s history, which in turn has produced the most sexually uptight generation on record. In medical parlance, iatrogenic, the cure has been worse than the disease. Why is this so?
First of all, the desire for sexual security and the feeling of sexual insecurity are the same thing. Remember to hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society obsessed with a quest for sexual security is patently insecure. Such a society might be compared to a breath retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as red as a beet.
Secondly, the kind of security we are speaking of is not physical but primarily spiritual and psychological. Sex is only part of nature in which a disproportionate amount of time is spent in quest of food, drink, shelter and clothing to survive as a species.
Stated in another way, we are only sexually active a small part of our existence. The most sensuous part of us is not our body, but our mind. To satisfy the mind through the body by sensitivity training, touching exercises and quasi-scientifically designed love making therapies has been an interesting development. We know, for instance, that a newly born baby responds positively to be touched, held, petted, and cooed to, contributing to the child’s positive development. So, intimate contact is good. The “joy of sex” has taken up this theme and carried it into the adult world against cultural taboo.
The problem comes when we are persons second and sex objects first. Provocative dress, for example, especially among women, suggests “exploit me, let me show you the ways.” Much of this is first done in innocence, but it can become the justification in some people’s mind for sexual exploitation.
The indicators are reflected in the rise of venereal disease to nearly epidemic proportions. The contradiction between the manifest and latent function of our identity through sexuality is illustrated in “The Thin Edge Report (1975):
· Live births for adults are up 23 percent since 1940; they are up 323 percent for unwed teenagers for that same period.
· In 1974, alone, teenagers gave birth to a record 608,000 illegitimate children.
The full impact of this changing socialization process is yet to be determined. It is this focus on sexuality, which has, at least in part, increased our prevalent sense of separateness that has made us feel insecure. This is quite opposite to that intended. How could it be otherwise?
To be secure, sexually or in any other way, means to isolate and fortify the “I” in “me.” But it is this feeling of being an isolated “I,” which makes us feel lonely and afraid. This puts the pressure on us to prove we are sexually desirable at any cost. The problem feeds on itself. The more sexual security we can muster the more we shall want and have to have. Statistics bear this out for all types of security. It would appear we are looking for security in all the wrong places.
In case you didn’t notice, there is a paradox at work here. We want to be happy, to forget ourselves, and yet the more we try to forget ourselves the more we remember and are obsessed with the self we want to forget, resulting in increased unhappiness. We think happiness is a thing: a loving relationship, a career, a new car, a fine home, and an idyllic family. Happiness may include some or all of these things, but it is none of them, because happiness is only a state of mind that has nothing to do with circumstances. Watts (1951) puts it this way:
“Happiness is something to experience, not explain. Once you attempt to explain it, you lose it.”
We want to escape from the pain of loneliness, but the more we struggle to escape and press to be accepted, the more we inflame the agony as less as less others want to be in our company.
We fear we are despicable, and want to be brave and press on, but our efforts to be brave become like fear trying to run from itself. We want to enjoy peace of mind and contentment, but the more we attempt to pacify ourselves it becomes like trying to stop worrying, causing us to worry even more.
We worry because we feel insecure and unaccepted and want to be secure and accepted. We know that worrying is futile, but we go on worrying because calling it futile does not stop it.
Given this predicament, it is useless to say that we should not want to be secure. Everyone wants to be secure, leastwise that is what we have been led to believe.
What we are discovering in the process of what seems so futile is that there is a key to all this, and that key is that there is no such thing as security; to seek security is to embrace isolation, and isolation is enhanced as we press to become secure. Likewise, we cannot seek happiness because in the seeking we only become unhappier. Happiness is a choice, a state of mind, not something that can be explained, but only embraced.
What a powerful discovery! To know there is no escape from insecurity; there is no sanctuary for the “I” until we let go of it. We understand we must not face the “I,” but be it! In being it, we have acquired the wisdom of insecurity. We have come to accept our lot and to deal with it. We no longer look for acceptance outside ourselves but inside ourselves. We have become our own best friend. We have chosen to be happy because we can.
Erich Fromm (1941) provides a caveat to this freedom. He sees modern man freed from the bondage of pre-industrial society, on the one hand, which has simultaneously given him limited security, but on the other, has failed to give him freedom as an individual:
“Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless. This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of this freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom, which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man.”
We cannot have it both ways, Fromm is saying, we cannot be free and secure in that freedom, and beholden and dependent on others for our sense of worth and satisfaction. That is only one of the crossroads challenging modern man. We are in the post-Christian era as well as the post-industrial. As cogent as Fromm’s analysis, it is just that, an analysis, a theory, and a talking point to better understand our present circumstances. Its importance is that the foundation of our society that we have taken for granted is shifting, and we are shifting with it, and should take note, and make adjustments.
The last half-century cannot be explained away by social change theorists. It cannot be analyzed into submission. Analysis is not action. We are in a societal revolution of global proportions. Nothing is quite as it was: not the family, church, school, industry, or government. What once worked well is working poorly now, or not at all.
There has been change in conduct, thinking, and feeling, which is well documented, but there is a seismic change in philosophy of life, which is not. The social and behavioral sciences are stuck in their own rhetoric and paradigms. The physical sciences are chasing unnamed atoms or exploding stars. Mathematical models are clean and can be replicated, are predictable. The collection of atoms designated, as people are not. While the physical sciences escape the confinement of their physical bodies in sanitized research, the social and behavioral sciences have hardened self-consciously around quantitative objective research when people are totally subjective beings. Small wonder the great insights into present humanity have come from poets, novelists, and social philosophers.
The challenge and opportunity is young people. Young people want to go with the flow. Life to them is less a question mark but something to experience. They move innocently into a culture of free low, drugs, cohabitation without a marriage license while their parents are obsessed with success, career, upward mobility and wealth, creating a great divide between them. The divide is broaden by less a resentment of authority than a total disregard of it; the same goes for conventional religion; the same goes for attending classes and graduating from school; the same goes for work and responsibility; the same goes for planning for the future. To them the future is now, so why sweat it!
This is not simply a case of society dumbing down to the lowest common denominator. It is a movement away from maturity to immaturity, from dressing, talking, acting and thinking in ways far removed from the norm.
A societal revolution is taking place right under everyone’s eyes, which baffles the best of parents and other authority figures. The result is parents are acting like children, and children have become their own parents, and everyone is attempting to escape from Fromm’s freedom. Lost in this great escape is the gravitas of the situation, and the need for somebody to be in charge, while the mindless cry of “now” reverberates: “do it now, have it now, be it now!” Seemingly forgotten is that we are all on this same boat going down this boundless river of time.
11. Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety, A Vintage Book, New York, 1951.
12. Samuel Warner, Self-Realization and Self-Defeat, Grove Press, New York, 1966.
13. Gregory Bates, The Ecology of the Mind, Chandler Publishing, New York, 1972.
14. Ibid, Watts.
15. Calvin S. Hall, A Primer of Freudian Psychology, A Mentor Book, New York, 1954.
16. The Thin Edge Report, Public Broadcasting System, Television Channel 3, Tampa, Florida, May, 1975.
17. Ibid, Watts.
18. Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom, Rinehart & Company, New York, 1941.
THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2007
“We have been taught to neglect, despise, and violate our bodies, and to put all faith in our brains. Indeed, the special disease of civilized man might be described as a block or schism between his brain (specifically, the cortex) and the rest of his body. This corresponds to the split between the ‘I’ and ‘me,’ man and nature, and to the confusion of Ouroboros (Greek word means "tail swallower") the mixed up snake, who does not know that his tail belongs with his head. We have allowed brain thinking to develop and dominate our lives out of all proportion to instinctual wisdom, which we are allowing to slump into atrophy.”
Alan W. Watts
British Philosopher
The conflict does not end with this obsession with roots and security. It actually begins here as our brains war with our bodies. We see it all around us. The brain desires food and pleasure and comfort or things that the body does not want. The brain gives the body directions it will not follow. And the body gives the brain impulses it does not understand.
This has manifested itself as a double bind between personal integrity and security; between contentment and anxiety. It prompted Samuel Warner (1966) to depict this conflict as a war between self-realization and self-defeat. Gregory Bateson (1972) it this way:
A double bind is a situation in which an individual feels they are receiving contradictory messages from a highly significant person, which result inconsistent and sometimes disruptive behavior.
So, it is an intra-war (between the brain and the body) and also an inter-war (between authority givers and receivers). I worked in an organization in which managers were asked to take a voluntary pay cut up to twenty percent, which they believed was to save the company. It puzzled them greatly, however, when the annual report came out showing that senior managers across the board were given twenty percent bonuses.
It is so easy to forget that we are animals. When we compare human with animal desire, we find many extraordinary differences. The animal tends to eat with his stomach, and the man with his brain. When the animal’s stomach is full, it stops eating, but the man is never sure when to stop so he keeps on eating. When he has eaten as much as his stomach can take, he still feels empty.
Depression, loneliness, and lack of esteem or many other shades of self-deception may feed the mind’s sense of emptiness. So, he eats on for compensatory gratification.
This is largely due to anxiety, to the knowledge that a constant supply of food is uncertain. I watched a man grow from 200 pounds on a six-foot frame to over 400, as an adult. Seemingly, he could never get enough food to satisfy his psychological need. He had nearly starved to death as a small boy as his prostitute mother left him alone for days without food with all the doors locked. He eventually contracted diabetes in his mature years, and died in his fifties.
In the uncertain world of constant war, where instability and insecurity plague the conscience, pleasure is uncertain, which feeds a compulsion to take pleasure where we find it.
We stimulate our sense organs with food and drink, cigarettes and booze, or advertisers stimulate them for us, to the point that our organs become insensitive. Then we look beyond simple pleasures to the surreal world of drugs, brutal sports, and the craziness of death-defying stunts.
The brain is in pursuit of happiness. Because it is much more concerned about the future than the present, it conceives happiness as the guarantee to a pleasure filled life. Yet, the brain knows that a life of pleasure is of limited duration. So it attempts to cram as much pleasure as possible into the span of a few years, burning the candle at both ends with the mindset, “you’re only young once!”
Modern society has invented this self-destructive vicious circle as it refuses to live in the present clamoring always for the future to unfold. It is no accident that slogan writers created the General Electric catch phrase, “Progress is our most important product,” as progress denotes the future. This translates into the pursuit of more, always better, finer, more convenient, and more pleasurable. Ironically, this slogan condemns us all to a life of perpetual frustration.
Consequently, we are vulnerable to anyone who has a future oriented gadget. For years, it was limited to those that occupied the occult world and trafficked in innocuous fantasies. Now, the occult has become mainstream in futuristic proclamations of physical scientists, medical professionals, and enterprising technologists with the promise of bionic man, and a universe of robotics and Dick Tracy contraptions.
If but one of these contraptions touches our uncertainties, or forgives an excess, we will line up to buy its color, composition and construction without a moment’s reflection. Even this is not enough; we must make heroes of these creators, as they provide a pause in our all out war with our real and imagined enemies. They give us an opportunity to breathe a sigh of relief for not having to deal with our problems.
Patent medicine is a television dinner of the mind. Yet, in fairness, is it not necessary in this busy-busy, dog-eat-dog world we have created? Who has time to solve their problems anyway? We are too busy living for the future to pay attention to the present.
The future, of course, is an abstraction, a rational inference from experience, which exists only in the mind. Primary consciousness of the basic mind knows reality, but does not know the future. It lives completely in the present and is capable of perceiving only “what is,” or the moment.
The brain, however, retains memory and by using it is able to make predictions. These predictions vary from reliable (everyone will eventually die) to fanciful (anyone can become president). Watts (1951) saw this clearly leaving us with this consideration:
“The future is still not here, and cannot become a part of experienced reality until it is present. Since what we know of the future is made up of purely abstract and logical elements – inferences, guesses, deductions – it cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, seen, heard, or otherwise enjoyed. To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead. This is why all the affairs of civilization are rushed, why hardly anyone enjoys what he has, and is forever seeking more and more. Happiness, then, will consist, not of solid and substantial realities, but of such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes, and assurances.”
We see this futuristic psychobabble in the language of humanists, which is hyphenated with such words as reinforcement, satisfiers, trade offs and hygiene factors.
At first glance, it would appear we have no trouble being prisoners of someone else’s mind, a mind that would gather all our loose ends and doubts, package them, and tie them neatly together into a bundle of security.
This is revealed in the con we play on ourselves. We accept the pabulum of experts and the promise of security because we don’t want to change. We want to believe experts can protect us from insecurity and our fears, real and imagined, that threaten us. But even a kidder can kid himself only so long. Time runs out and reality sets in on these proffered myths that we can be healthy, wealthy and wise without changing the fluidity of our universe. Eventually, it seeps into the fissures of our brain that what is not earned is not learned.
Freud traced the problem of insecurity to the repression and suppression of the libido. There is little evidence today in this era of “make love, not war” that much repression and suppression exists. Still, insecurity reigns supreme in every quadrant of society.
We have gotten rid of Victorian and Puritanical double standards, yet man is still not at peace with his nature. Now that sex has come out of the closet it would appear that with all the research, educational programs, and the dissemination of information, sex education has gone awry of its intended purpose. Instead of blissful contentment, it has created the most permissive climate in Western society’s history, which in turn has produced the most sexually uptight generation on record. In medical parlance, iatrogenic, the cure has been worse than the disease. Why is this so?
First of all, the desire for sexual security and the feeling of sexual insecurity are the same thing. Remember to hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society obsessed with a quest for sexual security is patently insecure. Such a society might be compared to a breath retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as red as a beet.
Secondly, the kind of security we are speaking of is not physical but primarily spiritual and psychological. Sex is only part of nature in which a disproportionate amount of time is spent in quest of food, drink, shelter and clothing to survive as a species.
Stated in another way, we are only sexually active a small part of our existence. The most sensuous part of us is not our body, but our mind. To satisfy the mind through the body by sensitivity training, touching exercises and quasi-scientifically designed love making therapies has been an interesting development. We know, for instance, that a newly born baby responds positively to be touched, held, petted, and cooed to, contributing to the child’s positive development. So, intimate contact is good. The “joy of sex” has taken up this theme and carried it into the adult world against cultural taboo.
The problem comes when we are persons second and sex objects first. Provocative dress, for example, especially among women, suggests “exploit me, let me show you the ways.” Much of this is first done in innocence, but it can become the justification in some people’s mind for sexual exploitation.
The indicators are reflected in the rise of venereal disease to nearly epidemic proportions. The contradiction between the manifest and latent function of our identity through sexuality is illustrated in “The Thin Edge Report (1975):
· Live births for adults are up 23 percent since 1940; they are up 323 percent for unwed teenagers for that same period.
· In 1974, alone, teenagers gave birth to a record 608,000 illegitimate children.
The full impact of this changing socialization process is yet to be determined. It is this focus on sexuality, which has, at least in part, increased our prevalent sense of separateness that has made us feel insecure. This is quite opposite to that intended. How could it be otherwise?
To be secure, sexually or in any other way, means to isolate and fortify the “I” in “me.” But it is this feeling of being an isolated “I,” which makes us feel lonely and afraid. This puts the pressure on us to prove we are sexually desirable at any cost. The problem feeds on itself. The more sexual security we can muster the more we shall want and have to have. Statistics bear this out for all types of security. It would appear we are looking for security in all the wrong places.
In case you didn’t notice, there is a paradox at work here. We want to be happy, to forget ourselves, and yet the more we try to forget ourselves the more we remember and are obsessed with the self we want to forget, resulting in increased unhappiness. We think happiness is a thing: a loving relationship, a career, a new car, a fine home, and an idyllic family. Happiness may include some or all of these things, but it is none of them, because happiness is only a state of mind that has nothing to do with circumstances. Watts (1951) puts it this way:
“Happiness is something to experience, not explain. Once you attempt to explain it, you lose it.”
We want to escape from the pain of loneliness, but the more we struggle to escape and press to be accepted, the more we inflame the agony as less as less others want to be in our company.
We fear we are despicable, and want to be brave and press on, but our efforts to be brave become like fear trying to run from itself. We want to enjoy peace of mind and contentment, but the more we attempt to pacify ourselves it becomes like trying to stop worrying, causing us to worry even more.
We worry because we feel insecure and unaccepted and want to be secure and accepted. We know that worrying is futile, but we go on worrying because calling it futile does not stop it.
Given this predicament, it is useless to say that we should not want to be secure. Everyone wants to be secure, leastwise that is what we have been led to believe.
What we are discovering in the process of what seems so futile is that there is a key to all this, and that key is that there is no such thing as security; to seek security is to embrace isolation, and isolation is enhanced as we press to become secure. Likewise, we cannot seek happiness because in the seeking we only become unhappier. Happiness is a choice, a state of mind, not something that can be explained, but only embraced.
What a powerful discovery! To know there is no escape from insecurity; there is no sanctuary for the “I” until we let go of it. We understand we must not face the “I,” but be it! In being it, we have acquired the wisdom of insecurity. We have come to accept our lot and to deal with it. We no longer look for acceptance outside ourselves but inside ourselves. We have become our own best friend. We have chosen to be happy because we can.
Erich Fromm (1941) provides a caveat to this freedom. He sees modern man freed from the bondage of pre-industrial society, on the one hand, which has simultaneously given him limited security, but on the other, has failed to give him freedom as an individual:
“Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless. This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of this freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom, which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man.”
We cannot have it both ways, Fromm is saying, we cannot be free and secure in that freedom, and beholden and dependent on others for our sense of worth and satisfaction. That is only one of the crossroads challenging modern man. We are in the post-Christian era as well as the post-industrial. As cogent as Fromm’s analysis, it is just that, an analysis, a theory, and a talking point to better understand our present circumstances. Its importance is that the foundation of our society that we have taken for granted is shifting, and we are shifting with it, and should take note, and make adjustments.
The last half-century cannot be explained away by social change theorists. It cannot be analyzed into submission. Analysis is not action. We are in a societal revolution of global proportions. Nothing is quite as it was: not the family, church, school, industry, or government. What once worked well is working poorly now, or not at all.
There has been change in conduct, thinking, and feeling, which is well documented, but there is a seismic change in philosophy of life, which is not. The social and behavioral sciences are stuck in their own rhetoric and paradigms. The physical sciences are chasing unnamed atoms or exploding stars. Mathematical models are clean and can be replicated, are predictable. The collection of atoms designated, as people are not. While the physical sciences escape the confinement of their physical bodies in sanitized research, the social and behavioral sciences have hardened self-consciously around quantitative objective research when people are totally subjective beings. Small wonder the great insights into present humanity have come from poets, novelists, and social philosophers.
The challenge and opportunity is young people. Young people want to go with the flow. Life to them is less a question mark but something to experience. They move innocently into a culture of free low, drugs, cohabitation without a marriage license while their parents are obsessed with success, career, upward mobility and wealth, creating a great divide between them. The divide is broaden by less a resentment of authority than a total disregard of it; the same goes for conventional religion; the same goes for attending classes and graduating from school; the same goes for work and responsibility; the same goes for planning for the future. To them the future is now, so why sweat it!
This is not simply a case of society dumbing down to the lowest common denominator. It is a movement away from maturity to immaturity, from dressing, talking, acting and thinking in ways far removed from the norm.
A societal revolution is taking place right under everyone’s eyes, which baffles the best of parents and other authority figures. The result is parents are acting like children, and children have become their own parents, and everyone is attempting to escape from Fromm’s freedom. Lost in this great escape is the gravitas of the situation, and the need for somebody to be in charge, while the mindless cry of “now” reverberates: “do it now, have it now, be it now!” Seemingly forgotten is that we are all on this same boat going down this boundless river of time.
11. Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety, A Vintage Book, New York, 1951.
12. Samuel Warner, Self-Realization and Self-Defeat, Grove Press, New York, 1966.
13. Gregory Bates, The Ecology of the Mind, Chandler Publishing, New York, 1972.
14. Ibid, Watts.
15. Calvin S. Hall, A Primer of Freudian Psychology, A Mentor Book, New York, 1954.
16. The Thin Edge Report, Public Broadcasting System, Television Channel 3, Tampa, Florida, May, 1975.
17. Ibid, Watts.
18. Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom, Rinehart & Company, New York, 1941.
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