THE POINT OF VIEW FOR MY WORK AS AN AUTHOR
WHO IS THIS?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 2007
NOTE: This is a mystery interview and the reader is to attempt to determine whom this “point of view” concerns. The author is prolific as well as polemical. His origins are from humble birth but he has acquired some affluence allowing him to be a peripatetic wanderer and wonderer. There are many that are in accord with his thinking but he continuously offends them by making them out to be the enemy; and he takes pride in his singularity of conscience while triumphing the common man.
My work is virtually impossible to classify. Is it literature, philosophy, psychology, sociology or religious apologetics? In any case, I write with the world in revolution. The age of the “common man” has indeed arrived.
We have moved through many ages and now find ourselves emphasizing the primacy of feeling and fantasy; indeed, a philosophy of personality has arrived. It is opposed in different ways to result in anarchy of subjectivism and individualism.
Consequently, a sense of reality has been lost with people fleeing the requirements of reality, taking refuge in a life of habit or rote religious conformity. Alas, we have abandoned our internal self-definition, which provides understanding as individuals before attempting to relate to a church or government or, indeed, society.
The only way a person is “real” is when in charge of the inner life of the soul as well as outer life of the body. It is a matter of making choices, which is a measure of free will.
We once used our inner world to recognize life’s differences in terms of good and evil, right and wrong and to act with decisive significance. There was no inclination to volatilize our problems into speculative synthesis and nonexistence. We accepted that a human being existed to make choices, not speculative leaps of discernment. The simplest man recognized these differences and didn’t hide behind irrelevant babble, as now do scholars.
Unfortunately, the clutter of learning often interrupts the person’s relationship to himself. As a consequence, the ability to make pure ethical choices is placed in jeopardy. He is unfree and education rather than making him freer has made him even less so for his high mindedness.
Freedom is naked and precisely concrete. It is not an abstraction. It means taking responsibility for virtually every segment of one’s entire life, for only then will the content of that life hold meaning. No matter how different the gifts and talents of the individual may be, he is equal in his freedom to manage and develop consistent with those gifts, nothing less is a travesty. Personal validity can be earned in no other way.
We are faced from birth with everything increasingly external in an eternal and unceasing struggle between opposite tendencies. This is not something to mourn but to use. It starts by fighting to engage our instincts for survival. This is not a fight for a part but for the whole of us, and is commanded by our morality. Everyone knows this; knows we were made for action, not speculation. But our culture entangles us in speculation and contradiction putting up arbitrary signs that confuse and delay action. We must fight through these if not completely at least in part.
I have enthusiasm for the natural sciences, but I would not make them my principal field of interest. The virtue of reason and freedom and life, itself, has always interested me more. But my interests are not subordinated under one heading but coordinated with one another. I will admit I find the natural sciences attractive while theology in general and religion in particular appalls me. Nor will I deny this betrays weakness that would be a sign of strength were I to demonstrate, like many fish, to remain at the bottom of the sea without feeling the need to surface like a glinting sunfish. It is probably why some give me the tag of the idealist while others paint me in caricature as a comic figure.
I am known to read a great deal, and it is a correct characterization. But I have a confession to make. I am quite oblivious to the author’s intention in every book I read because I always have an eye on how it will serve my own self-understanding or particular interest.
I am also known to be repetitious of which I will have more to say later. My focus is always on “actuality.” It appears in life as ideal and in caricature. When I see it in caricature, I attack it, as it is a misrepresentation of the ideal.
In the new spirit of freedom that has embraced our land, I see everywhere around me indolence and self-satisfied mediocrity and the cautious calm produced by wealth. I hear much talk of equality, but I take arms against an abstraction at odds with its concrete reality. Everyone should have access to quality education, the highborn and the lowborn, country people and city dwellers. That is equality not as an abstraction but as reality.
I am suspicious of the crowd and “the public,” of any reference that reduces the individual to an entity with a separate will and calling that may in any way jeopardize his personal sovereignty. I see this demonstrated in the religious who claim the Savior died for the whole world but was resurrected for only practicing Christians.
Some find me vague with my internal self-definition of the individual. What it means is that the individual in the context of choice and making decisions will do himself no harm. I am blunt and emphatic about this. Internal development and integrity cannot be suborned by external authority; indeed, the individual has a perfect right to act in defiance of that authority should it be inconsistent with his personal integrity.
I am committed to the common man. I have no time for fanatics and mystics who attempt to engage him. They lack the imagination to appreciate the wonder of work. You will never find the common man creating heathen mythologies and power breaches, as he is too busy toiling for existence. He understands cruelty and corruption because he is often its victim. When change is proposed, and sacrifice demanded, it is asked always in his name, while he waits patiently in the hall for its spoils. So, when revolt comes or rebellion occurs, he is the one to die for an ill-begotten cause.
I have my problem with the crowd. It represents untruth except insofar as each person in the crowd, separately and as a single individual, relates to its idea. But the crowd invariably is reduced at some point into a mob without conscience and without restraint and therefore I have a total antipathy towards it.
I had an authoritative father. Even as a boy, my glimpse of him was as a troubled human being, a Job or a Daniel in a Lion’s den. He had trouble seeing me, as I am, a dreamer, a kind of poet, an artist of fantasy, a thinker. I must confess I didn’t understand my father fully. But in him I encountered the common man, a man for whom education was neither a crutch nor a mask, and where the pure of heart took easy residence.
There is a chance I would have been a greater writer if my father hadn’t given me a cross to bear. He called it “reality.” He was always bringing me back to earth from my flights of thought, which he saw as conjuring illusion. It would be shallow of me to think my father had a fixation on me. More accurate would be to say he was a great influence. The true upbringing that takes place in any home is always the self-education of the parents, which lives in silence.
My father gave me an appreciation of his self-education in everyday life, which I discovered was the self-discipline and basis of his authority and independence of spirit. I would make it mine. It would be inappropriate to wax psychological about this.
The truth is my father’s triumph of self-discipline over his natural and instinctual life was not the result of complexes and neuroses that constitute psychology. The health of his spirit was the fruit of an anxiety that neither weakened him nor led him astray, but instead led to the rebirth of his integrity by earnestly engaging reality. In that sense, he was the existential foundation of my thought.
I have a brother who has always been conscience-plagued, anxiety-ridden, and what I have used more often than not to describe as being “pusillanimous.” The truth is he has never been young in the spiritual sense and I have never been young in the physical sense, but spiritually always since my youth, and in a good sense. I have been granted certain courage and openness that has enabled me to take life on whereas he has always shied away from it, allowing decisions to be made for him. I see this as the difference between living up to, or not living up to one’s character.
Much as I am indebted to my father, there was a mother, too. She was the silent power behind the unending chatter that has been my life. I am talking about a sort of silence that goes beyond human speech, a silence that communicates to the soul. The simplest person or the most complex individual, should he be attuned to this silent speech, profits beyond his wildest dreams. You see, my mother is always in my mind.
Whereas my father’s melancholy was palpable, my mother’s was concealed behind her high spirits and irony. This was an art she managed to pass on to me, but not my brother. My mother was a great reader but could not write, leaving that too me. She was a kind little woman with an unpretentious cheerful turn of mind. She made me the apple of her eye.
Consequently, I was a frightfully spoiled and naughty child who hung on her apron strings. Where some who came to our home talked in a high-minded fashion, she was silent, possessed of uncomplicated warmth and paid them no mind. Yet, as a bit of irony, I find many of my mother’s words have found their way into my writing.
These words I can best describe as coming out of her silence because they spoke to a language not expressed directly in the Word. By that I mean she is a believer, a hearer of the Word, who has never forgotten the Word. So, she is not distracted by the descriptions of the Word, as she is a person of faith.
She was silent; she is silence. Neither does she talk about religion in the community or at home. I hope this does not imply that she is a simpleminded person because she is not. While everyone is talking in a high-minded fashion, she sits in silence. I often wondered when I was young what this silence meant. She would tend to her house, as though with her entire soul, even down to the most insignificant detail.
She is joyful and full of merriment. She is the joy of the house more than we as children are. Yet when you are looking at her sitting there smiling you cannot but say, she is silence. So often I wanted to ask her what was behind all this, but never found the courage. I find now at this late date that she bequeathed this power to me so that I could capture the silence between the words.
It is in silence that a taste for ironic playfulness, for humor and concealment, for the interesting and the spicy, for the point counterpoint sense and senselessness is found in song. I have it and she gave it to me as a gift.
My father gave me an understanding and appreciation of my common roots, and the pride of that identity with common man. He made me see that many men claim an outward sympathy for them but it is a ruse. They actually see themselves as apart from common man as if on another level. Such fundamental elements of my youth have become primary to my philosophical foundation.
I am an observer, but as such I am among them, but as a consequence not one of them. Is this in the service of deception? I think not. It is necessary to see things as they are.
From my earliest youth, it would be safe to say I have been incommensurable with the opinions of my time. I was an individual looking for the single Archimedean point from which to move the world. My father died and this earnest drive was put into action in his memory.
External relationships and surroundings were abandoned. I was driven totally by the fulfillment of inner needs. Like a person after a shipwreck, the world looked different to me in the absence of my father. I turned to what is highest after this emptiness. It was my absolute dawn; not only in its fullness, but also in the responsibility that I now felt was mine. Shadow and light, joy and perdition, anxiety and courage became amorphous so that at first I didn’t know precisely what I needed to do.
There I was, sitting at the last station of his way, the place where it all began. I sat there entirely alone, thinking of my father and what was past lost in the present. I saw him as a poor boy and felt homesickness because of his descriptions. He was gone and I was a young man lost in what the future held.
What if I now were to fall ill and join him? What a strange thought. His last wish for me was to fulfill my destiny. Could this be the whole of my earthly destiny? From him I learned what fatherly love is, and thus received a notion of divine fatherly love, the only unshakable thing in life, and the true Archimedean point.
Yet, my mind was full of confusion. I remained for three days separate from community, alone with him in my thoughts. I then hurried home anxious for the journey, longing for the embrace of a young girl, and to start my work.
I had come to equilibrium. To one person it is found in joy, to another it is discovered in tears and permission to rest, yet the divine is reflected in the tear-dimmed eyes of a restless person for action, as a rainbow is more beautiful than the clear blue sky.
It was apparent from the first that I would go against the grain. It is the manner of how I would fight for truth. I would not be blinded by hidden social fears where manner is the message, but by reason. I would exalt the common man whom I understood so well. I understood, too, my campaign would be an attack on “the establishment.” How else could it be?
I had studied hard and understood the content and form of culture with a natural loyalty to the triumvirate that determined taste, faith and knowledge. Consequently, even when I was attacking the establishment I would think well of it. It was because I understood the tenor of my times as few others did. The spirit of my age ran the gamut from wit to sentimentality, and despite a dim sadness, it was salted with irony, and irony was my weapon.
I was fighting the cloak of coyness transformed into reciprocal wariness that pulled everyone down to the same level. The tenor of the times was animated with futile conversation that dulled the edge of possible originality. Skepticism was harbored against anything original, particularly when it originated from the lower classes. The world was reduced to polished pretense. Alas, the times lacked pathos and passion, giving me reason to construct my books as bombs to explode this smugness.
This brings me back to my point of repetition.
Repetition is the relationship between perfectibility and metamorphosis. You cannot write well until you write continuously, repetitively. You cannot overcome stage fright until you transform your jittery nerves into composure and ease onstage. You cannot become a polished thinker until you penetrate your ignorance with acumen. You cannot overcome your clumsiness and self-consciousness until you repeatedly place yourself in embarrassing situations. Nor can you hear the beauty of your mind unless you exercise it.
The whole piece is self-examination in playful analysis. Repetitiveness leads to reliability, and reliability is the existential touchstone that makes it possible to defend all this playfulness.
We have it on good authority that high brows think and behave differently than low brows think and behave. This is hypocrisy. Common man is comfortable with his playfulness and does not have to identify it as if something else. He understands without words what the high brows need to commit to volumes.
When he displays unrest, it is genuine and there is purpose behind it. His unrest signifies the first fieriness of essential genius. It reveals something elemental, inexhaustible, like the wind or the sounds of nature. When he feels joy, it is revealed in his playfulness and happy innocence, a triumphant awareness of his indescribable good fortune. Likewise, when angry, it rises from his bowels not his head. It is nature released in storm.
It is so easy to misread him. He displays the ability to be simultaneously deceptive and truthful, playing with thematic nuances with the coquettish cackle of calm amidst agitation.
All that is needed to bring out this genius is the possibility of metamorphosis through repetitive opportunity. Then a fresh and lively originality will surface. Passion will have broken out into many facets within a smoldering framework, a sort of torment that is prevented from bursting into flame. The common man is the future.
When I was young and fiery, I rode daringly on ideas, vaulted over stars and down into the abyss. Some admired me and the envious carped. Time has validated me. Some things have been consigned to the past, but the ideal in recollection has cast a brilliant light. It is now a quiet fire with an imperishable glow.
This glow rests in the eternity of the essential genius of the idea. It has no wishful longing after the flames has disappeared. The metamorphosis is too rich for that. Like an idealizing light, pure and reassuring recollection will continue to illuminate.
To make myself clear, the metamorphosis that reveals the idea is in the notion of reliability. Reliability is dependent on the repetitious role of our endeavor. The clumsy act becomes polished over time. Therefore, repetition is the role that makes a simple act imperishable in the glow of genius and recollection.
I will end my introduction to THE POINT OF VIEW FOR MY WORK AS AN AUTHOR by admitting this is a revolutionary age. Doubt is parent to the man and we live with such parents.
Devoid of passion or pathos in an age of revolution we are ill prepared to find passion or pathos even though essential. It must be cultivated. The elasticity of the inner being is the measure of this cultivation. An unsophisticated woman who is essentially in love is essentially cultivated. A common man who has an essential and passionate commitment to an important decision is essentially cultivated.
On the other hand, a superficial and fragmentary set of manners as measure of the man, display inner emptiness. Doubt is covered with swagger instead of humility, reducing action to form and affectation.
We live in such an age where reflection is substituted for action. The strength of speculation signals waste and sterility. Spectacular deception has lured us away from all else. People are preoccupied with the past and discouraged in the present content to allow the future to imitate itself.
I am a child of my times and have had to fight without authority, and without the power or influence of that authority. Reluctantly, I have had to assume the role of prophet who wishes only to lead his lost generation back to its time-honored ways. My fight is for the individual against “the public,” as history has shown is the beginning and end of all.
WHO DO YOU THINK THIS IS?
Well, I’ll leave you in no longer in suspense. It is SOREN KIERKEGAARD who was born in Denmark in 1813 and died at the age of forty-two in 1855. He is the father of existential philosophy that permeates virtually every segment of our Western society today from education to engineering, architecture to the arts, social and behavior sciences to the physical sciences, literature to language, politics to governance, economics to ecology, and beyond.
He chose to be eccentric and although well educated and affluent, walked among the people on the street taking pride in his modest roots and their concerns. He was a prolific and polemical writer of books and articles and often was savaged in the press as an oddball, misfit and outsider.
Tall, straight, blond and handsome, he could be seen in his fine clothes in the most drab and rundown sections of the city, conversing with the unemployed, taking notes of their harrowing lives, and always checking the pulse of his city. There isn’t a writer or thinker of our times that doesn’t owe a debt to him and his pioneer work. Yet he was buried nearly in shame first having his funeral refused by state church. Few attended his funeral, while his grave was devoid of a headstone until twenty years later (1875).
None of his books sold well in his lifetime, but he continued to write up to the very end, collapsing on the street and dying shortly thereafter. Fortunately, his books have since become a source for scholars and students over the past one hundred and fifty two years. Most young people may not know his name but it is likely they live consistent with his existential philosophy for he had them in mind.
It is another reason why I have written A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.
PRORDER INFORMATION: $20 (S&H included); checks to: Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504.
Monday, March 19, 2007
REACTION TO SUNDAY MORNING OP-ED PAGE
REACTION TO A SUNDAY MORNING OP-ED OF THE TAMPA TRIBUNE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 18, 2007
___________
NOTE: I share this with you knowing that you are not likely to be privy to the columns discussed. Joseph Brown, an African American is an editorial writer for The Tampa Tribune. He wrote a column titled “Sports Franchises Score Big With Subsidies.” He specifically mentions billionaire Milton Glazer owner of the Tampa Bay Bucs, who didn’t put a dime in the building of the multimillion dollar stadium but still collects 100 percent of all proceeds in parking and the concession stands for other events as well as Buc home games.
Pat Buchanan, an Irish Catholic, writes a column titled “General Wanders Into Cultural War Free-Fire Zone.” He scolds General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, with one brush while providing the rationale and support for his comments on homosexuality and adultery on the other. Buchanan is a knowledgeable journalist, but is not convincing.
David Brooks, a practicing Jew, always seems to cut through the politics of the left and right to allow light to shine through the latticework. He writes in “Democrats Tap Dance Around Iraq” that stalwarts such as Senator Carl Levin, when push comes to show “no guts.” His views usually resonate with me. But I feel in his effort to be fair in this piece he is pusillanimous.
My other comments, which may seem spurious to the reader, are meant to illustrate my perspective, which may or may not resonate. I don’t feel there is enough of that. I’ve never cared what readers will think of what I say. I am more interested in what the reader thinks, if he or she thinks at all, about life forces and events that invade the world, an invasion that could cause collapse if we do not pay attention. I share this with you in that spirit.
___________
March 18, 2007
Joseph,
Today's Commentary section (March 18, 2007) was lively with you, Pat Buchanan and David Brooks, three astute observers of our passing times with reasoned commentaries of passing events.
Last Friday, I went to a book signing of a 75-year-old lady that now lives in North Carolina, and has written two books, one a mystery, the other a small collection of stories. She is a former teacher and these are her first two books.
The reason I happened to be there is that an author friend in North Carolina, and a fellow Clintonian (Iowa) asked that I meet her. Well, she was absolutely delightful, and there was a large overflowing turnout of friends and relatives, and even former students, as she once lived in this area (Forest Hills).
What I found palpable, however, is that it was not a "reading" audience, or, indeed, an audience that you typically found in bookstores. The women were more comfortable talking about their children, jabbering away and not listening to the lady; the men talked about "the Bucs" and the "NCAA" basketball tournament, while seemingly only my wife and I were listening to her.
Appropriately, nearly all of them bought books, books I wonder if they will read from a woman, who I hope writes as delightfully as she presents. If that is the case, it will be a loss if they do not read her.
So, what does this have to do with columns in the Commentary section today? I read with interest yours on sports moguls scoring big with community subsidies; Buchanan’s on military morals; and Brooks on Iraq.
Regarding your column, I didn't vote for the Community Investment Tax Credit that was funded by taxpayers to build a football stadium for Malcolm Glazer and the Tampa Bay Bucs. I actually applauded former Mayor Bill Poe for his outstanding but fatalistic attempt to stop it. As a matter of fact, I also opposed football coming to the University of South Florida (USF), writing a column in your paper to that effect saying that when USF qualifies for a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, I will support USF football.
You are a University of Iowa graduate as am I, and I am a Phi Beta Kappa key holder as well, and you know they don't give them out with Cracker Jacks at Iowa.
Most of us do not go to professional sport games; most of us do not watch an entire game on television; most of us are struggling to stay afloat while the Glazers et al of professional sport make the Fortune Magazine Billionaire List. When it is "all about them" and the rationale that they so cleverly promulgate, blackmailing a community with "if you don't do this I will leave," then a community is stuck on its own petard.
Something is wrong with this picture when economics solely determine the health of a community. So, I find the arguments pro and con as irrelevant as much as specious.
Economics and sports were actually the measure of the downfall of Rome.
I've lived in your Chicago area, Indianapolis, Louisville and Tampa, as well as Paramaribo, Brussels and Johannesburg. These are all unique communities with unique histories, and none of which where professional sport was pivotal to that uniqueness. The Chicago Cubs of your fair city haven't been in the World Series since 1945, and then they lost to Detroit, yet the "losing Cubs" fill Wrigley Stadium every game for the love of the sport. This to me defines Chicago not as a loser town but instead as quite a winning city.
You would think a four-sport high school athlete like myself would be caught up in all this hype, but I've moved on, but wonder nonetheless the direction of everything as I am in the last quarter of my life.
Now, regarding the other columnists mentioned.
Pat Buchanan has a facetious argument regarding morality. Morality is always in the mind of the time. All the rational analysis notwithstanding, he's not going to change that.
General Pace, obviously a decent man, demonstrates his ignorance of the times with his comments on homosexuality. I've insisted in my writing that our leaders today are leaderless because they don't understand "it is not all about them."
Leadership is (always) all about the people of the time and how they attempt to cope with it. Moral laws are often laws of fear written by people of another time and circumstance that possess absolutely no understanding of the reality of our time because they are not members of it. Morality has changed greatly as to what is acceptable and what is not over my lifetime, and it has done so because it must.
David Brooks, who always tries to see both sides of a position, points out that Senator Levin, despite his erudition concerning the Iraq War and knowledge of the Iraq people has a blind spot when it comes to leadership.
Levin thinks that leadership "is all about the leaders" and all leaders have to do "is lead" and everything will fall into place. If it were only so easy, or so true!
Leadership is never about the leader. Leadership is always about the people. The people in Iraq are confused, hateful, fearful, and in a panic mode. They need to be understood, and then to be shown by their leaders how to deal with their confusion, hatred, fears, and by doing so to neutralize their panic, and show them the way forward. This is not an easy process and is far more complicated than a physics equation or a sophisticated weapon system. Quantitative and objective thinking has never solved qualitative and subjective human behavioral problems and it never will.
It is getting terribly old, and I will go to my grave saddened by it, but we can get along without leaders but we cannot get along without people who have the gumption to school their leadership in how to lead them.
Everything starts and stops at ground level.
I will confess my bias was showing when I mentioned some literary writers during the discussion period of the book signing, and not a single person knew who I was talking about, including the author of the book signing. My elitism came to the fore as if book reading "was all about me" and my love of literature. But that would be wrong.
These were good people, close to the ground, glad to see each other, happy in community, and bonding in a natural way with a book signing being the synthetic binder of the moment.
I caught myself in my own deception, a deception that frequently visits our leaders. Books are never about the authors that write them in the same manner that leadership is never about the leaders who lead, nor are the columnists mentioned here about their commentaries. The diverse opinions expressed in the Commentary today ventilate the air we breathe to cause a reader such as myself to express my thoughts, as the Commentary "is all about us."
Iraq needs that chance to be "all about them," and it is not going to be provided if the focus is on the leaders and not on the led.
The poor Florida Orchestra of accomplished musicians deals with crumbs and nobody seems to mind. When I first came to Brussels and enter the historic center of town, "the Grand Place" (pronounced "gran plaz") more than a thousand young people were sitting on the cobble stones listening to a Mozart Concert. No major sports team here. That was 1986; God only knows what it is like today.
Professional sport, all professional sport, personifies violence while celebrating perfection. Even basketball, which is supposed to be a non-contact sport, has found players jumping into the stands to beat up fans, or clobbering fellow players sending them to the hospital.
I attend my ten-year-old granddaughter’s volley ball games on a regular basis at the Temple Terrace Recreation Center. They usually lose, usually all three games. They are a team made of white and black kids, and obviously of differing cultural as well as socioeconomic circumstances. But these kids support each other, don't ride each other when they foul up, and don't mope off the court when they lose.
These young ladies epitomize what Grantland Rice said, "It is not whether you win or lose but how you play the game." Well, they play it in a way to build towards being good citizens and leading healthy lives. Will that be destroyed before they are adults?
Before you say, "No," remember the words of the legendary coach Vince Lombardi of the Green Bay Packers, "Winning isn’t everything. Winning is the only thing."
Those words, which are taken to represent Americana, are killing us, as we as individuals, know a lot more about losing and dealing with it than ever winning. When we deny this, we live in a cave of our own making.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 18, 2007
___________
NOTE: I share this with you knowing that you are not likely to be privy to the columns discussed. Joseph Brown, an African American is an editorial writer for The Tampa Tribune. He wrote a column titled “Sports Franchises Score Big With Subsidies.” He specifically mentions billionaire Milton Glazer owner of the Tampa Bay Bucs, who didn’t put a dime in the building of the multimillion dollar stadium but still collects 100 percent of all proceeds in parking and the concession stands for other events as well as Buc home games.
Pat Buchanan, an Irish Catholic, writes a column titled “General Wanders Into Cultural War Free-Fire Zone.” He scolds General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, with one brush while providing the rationale and support for his comments on homosexuality and adultery on the other. Buchanan is a knowledgeable journalist, but is not convincing.
David Brooks, a practicing Jew, always seems to cut through the politics of the left and right to allow light to shine through the latticework. He writes in “Democrats Tap Dance Around Iraq” that stalwarts such as Senator Carl Levin, when push comes to show “no guts.” His views usually resonate with me. But I feel in his effort to be fair in this piece he is pusillanimous.
My other comments, which may seem spurious to the reader, are meant to illustrate my perspective, which may or may not resonate. I don’t feel there is enough of that. I’ve never cared what readers will think of what I say. I am more interested in what the reader thinks, if he or she thinks at all, about life forces and events that invade the world, an invasion that could cause collapse if we do not pay attention. I share this with you in that spirit.
___________
March 18, 2007
Joseph,
Today's Commentary section (March 18, 2007) was lively with you, Pat Buchanan and David Brooks, three astute observers of our passing times with reasoned commentaries of passing events.
Last Friday, I went to a book signing of a 75-year-old lady that now lives in North Carolina, and has written two books, one a mystery, the other a small collection of stories. She is a former teacher and these are her first two books.
The reason I happened to be there is that an author friend in North Carolina, and a fellow Clintonian (Iowa) asked that I meet her. Well, she was absolutely delightful, and there was a large overflowing turnout of friends and relatives, and even former students, as she once lived in this area (Forest Hills).
What I found palpable, however, is that it was not a "reading" audience, or, indeed, an audience that you typically found in bookstores. The women were more comfortable talking about their children, jabbering away and not listening to the lady; the men talked about "the Bucs" and the "NCAA" basketball tournament, while seemingly only my wife and I were listening to her.
Appropriately, nearly all of them bought books, books I wonder if they will read from a woman, who I hope writes as delightfully as she presents. If that is the case, it will be a loss if they do not read her.
So, what does this have to do with columns in the Commentary section today? I read with interest yours on sports moguls scoring big with community subsidies; Buchanan’s on military morals; and Brooks on Iraq.
Regarding your column, I didn't vote for the Community Investment Tax Credit that was funded by taxpayers to build a football stadium for Malcolm Glazer and the Tampa Bay Bucs. I actually applauded former Mayor Bill Poe for his outstanding but fatalistic attempt to stop it. As a matter of fact, I also opposed football coming to the University of South Florida (USF), writing a column in your paper to that effect saying that when USF qualifies for a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, I will support USF football.
You are a University of Iowa graduate as am I, and I am a Phi Beta Kappa key holder as well, and you know they don't give them out with Cracker Jacks at Iowa.
Most of us do not go to professional sport games; most of us do not watch an entire game on television; most of us are struggling to stay afloat while the Glazers et al of professional sport make the Fortune Magazine Billionaire List. When it is "all about them" and the rationale that they so cleverly promulgate, blackmailing a community with "if you don't do this I will leave," then a community is stuck on its own petard.
Something is wrong with this picture when economics solely determine the health of a community. So, I find the arguments pro and con as irrelevant as much as specious.
Economics and sports were actually the measure of the downfall of Rome.
I've lived in your Chicago area, Indianapolis, Louisville and Tampa, as well as Paramaribo, Brussels and Johannesburg. These are all unique communities with unique histories, and none of which where professional sport was pivotal to that uniqueness. The Chicago Cubs of your fair city haven't been in the World Series since 1945, and then they lost to Detroit, yet the "losing Cubs" fill Wrigley Stadium every game for the love of the sport. This to me defines Chicago not as a loser town but instead as quite a winning city.
You would think a four-sport high school athlete like myself would be caught up in all this hype, but I've moved on, but wonder nonetheless the direction of everything as I am in the last quarter of my life.
Now, regarding the other columnists mentioned.
Pat Buchanan has a facetious argument regarding morality. Morality is always in the mind of the time. All the rational analysis notwithstanding, he's not going to change that.
General Pace, obviously a decent man, demonstrates his ignorance of the times with his comments on homosexuality. I've insisted in my writing that our leaders today are leaderless because they don't understand "it is not all about them."
Leadership is (always) all about the people of the time and how they attempt to cope with it. Moral laws are often laws of fear written by people of another time and circumstance that possess absolutely no understanding of the reality of our time because they are not members of it. Morality has changed greatly as to what is acceptable and what is not over my lifetime, and it has done so because it must.
David Brooks, who always tries to see both sides of a position, points out that Senator Levin, despite his erudition concerning the Iraq War and knowledge of the Iraq people has a blind spot when it comes to leadership.
Levin thinks that leadership "is all about the leaders" and all leaders have to do "is lead" and everything will fall into place. If it were only so easy, or so true!
Leadership is never about the leader. Leadership is always about the people. The people in Iraq are confused, hateful, fearful, and in a panic mode. They need to be understood, and then to be shown by their leaders how to deal with their confusion, hatred, fears, and by doing so to neutralize their panic, and show them the way forward. This is not an easy process and is far more complicated than a physics equation or a sophisticated weapon system. Quantitative and objective thinking has never solved qualitative and subjective human behavioral problems and it never will.
It is getting terribly old, and I will go to my grave saddened by it, but we can get along without leaders but we cannot get along without people who have the gumption to school their leadership in how to lead them.
Everything starts and stops at ground level.
I will confess my bias was showing when I mentioned some literary writers during the discussion period of the book signing, and not a single person knew who I was talking about, including the author of the book signing. My elitism came to the fore as if book reading "was all about me" and my love of literature. But that would be wrong.
These were good people, close to the ground, glad to see each other, happy in community, and bonding in a natural way with a book signing being the synthetic binder of the moment.
I caught myself in my own deception, a deception that frequently visits our leaders. Books are never about the authors that write them in the same manner that leadership is never about the leaders who lead, nor are the columnists mentioned here about their commentaries. The diverse opinions expressed in the Commentary today ventilate the air we breathe to cause a reader such as myself to express my thoughts, as the Commentary "is all about us."
Iraq needs that chance to be "all about them," and it is not going to be provided if the focus is on the leaders and not on the led.
The poor Florida Orchestra of accomplished musicians deals with crumbs and nobody seems to mind. When I first came to Brussels and enter the historic center of town, "the Grand Place" (pronounced "gran plaz") more than a thousand young people were sitting on the cobble stones listening to a Mozart Concert. No major sports team here. That was 1986; God only knows what it is like today.
Professional sport, all professional sport, personifies violence while celebrating perfection. Even basketball, which is supposed to be a non-contact sport, has found players jumping into the stands to beat up fans, or clobbering fellow players sending them to the hospital.
I attend my ten-year-old granddaughter’s volley ball games on a regular basis at the Temple Terrace Recreation Center. They usually lose, usually all three games. They are a team made of white and black kids, and obviously of differing cultural as well as socioeconomic circumstances. But these kids support each other, don't ride each other when they foul up, and don't mope off the court when they lose.
These young ladies epitomize what Grantland Rice said, "It is not whether you win or lose but how you play the game." Well, they play it in a way to build towards being good citizens and leading healthy lives. Will that be destroyed before they are adults?
Before you say, "No," remember the words of the legendary coach Vince Lombardi of the Green Bay Packers, "Winning isn’t everything. Winning is the only thing."
Those words, which are taken to represent Americana, are killing us, as we as individuals, know a lot more about losing and dealing with it than ever winning. When we deny this, we live in a cave of our own making.
Be always well,
Jim
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
STOP THE TREADMILL, I WANT TO GET OFF!
STOP THE TREADMILL, I WANT TO GET OFF!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 2007
“Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face: from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of earth.”
Thomas Wolfe
LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL
There was a time when the rhythm of the seasons kept our feet on the ground in harmony with Mother Nature. It was a time when there were no pesticides to kill insects that ravaged our crops; when we took in stride the fickle hand of Mother Nature in terms of droughts and floods, tornadoes and hurricanes, erosions and corrosions because we had a bulwark of trees and rocks and natural barriers to control this rapacious disturbance of land and love and life.
We were hearty souls and accepted the unforgiving nature of Mother Nature as most of what and who and where we were was created out of her and went back to her as we came out of her.
It was an authentic cycle, with little invention other than what was necessary for survival, as a reflection of Mother Nature. But today we are so separated from our source of being that we run faster and faster without realizing we are not moving at all.
Everything we have is artificial and a barrier, the mother lode of invention. We are lost and fight desperately to return to the womb of our nature, but have lost our way, and so measure our lost ness in other ways. Today, we call it affluence.
QUALITY OF LIFE
Not only has our affluence failed to make us better off, it may actually have made us worse off. Not only does affluence fail to solve the most basic human problems, it creates new ones. We measure the wrong things; we adopt policies designed to promote the wrong things; we spend our affluence on the wrong things.
We have wasted too much time listening to economists. Milton Friedman, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve and now a private citizen like everyone else, tells a group we are heading for a recession and the Dow Jones Industrials plummet, as they do in Europe and Asia on cue to his words. He no longer is privy to the most current economic data but his celebrity still throws a wide swath.
Studies indicate that wealth is important as people struggle from poverty to subsistence. After that, welfare gains diminish and other aspects of life become more important. But once on this treadmill of wealth producing, it is nigh impossible to get off. It becomes the narcotic of the affluent.
The poverty of imagination kicks in and willful neglect of the evidence to the contrary is ignored.
Economic resources are not final goods. Wealth is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The true end is welfare, well-being, life satisfaction and usefulness. We all know this but something gnaws at us to be better off than the Jones and so we never get off the treadmill. We measure our identity and our worthiness by an ever-expanding display of affluence compounded by the incremental growth of our net income, paycheck to paycheck, or portfolio report to portfolio report.
Since we cannot define welfare, well being, life satisfaction or utility other than in ambiguous terms, we attempt to reduce everything to how much we make, how much we are worth.
What exactly does it mean to have 946 billionaires as reported by Fortune anyway? Or to see that in 1979 0.1 percent of American tax payers (those making $233, 539 or more in adjusted gross income) accounted for 3 percent of income according to the IRS, or that in 2000 the cutoff for the top 0.1 percent was $1.6 million and their share 10 percent of income?
This sounds as if a tremendous gap until you insert inflation. What it does indicate, and Time (March 19, 2007) reports this, is that the rich are assuming the major share of the tax burden. This has resulted in a major reduction in the deficit ($177 billion), but that does not necessarily bode well for the economy.
When wealth and taxes are not equally distributed across society, it is in a position for enormous collapse sometime in the future. Imagine what might happen if the rich, who are now paying 35 percent of the tax burden, suddenly go belly up. It is not a pleasant thought to contemplate.
Go to any sizable city in the Untied States and Europe and you see homeless; you see rundown neighborhoods; you see the poor in impoverished circumstances. Rome crumbled when citizens were distracted with coliseum extravaganzas rather than jobs. Money and welfare, jobs and identity go together. The more money we have the more welfare and well being and life satisfaction we have because we have a job and feel useful. Extremes in any case never serve people because what serves people is what we learned from Mother Nature and that is the rhythm and balance of life.
The paradox of wealth is that it absorbs more attention, more preoccupation with it, allowing less time and capacity to enjoy it. This is as much a function of having far too many choices to make as it is to being exposed to too many opportunities to make bad choices.
I have known a number of people who created wealth quickly – the millionaire kind – and just as quickly were paralyzed by it. Then I’ve known others equally as wealthy that made good choices, but complained about all the choices they left on the table and never exploited. In both cases, they eventually surrendered to depression, while those far less wealthy envied them, having no idea what they had escaped.
Economists tell us that choice shouldn’t work this way, but in my experience this is precisely how it has been seen to work.
Affluence requires more choices and therefore poses more problems that take time and energy to solve. If you can afford a private school for your children, with all its possibilities, your life has just grown a good deal more complicated. It is not only the five-figure fee for your little ones that is required but also your involvement. On this treadmill, the next iteration is a college that requires in the six-figures for a four-year degree, and then all the accoutrements expected at that level and status.
Once we have been blessed with the idea that we are affluent, the principal weakness to our status rears its ugly head, and that is our inability to exert self-control. We have a powerful tendency to indulge our children in all the excesses that now have become necessities of our own self-indulgence.
THE “HEDONISTIC TREADMILL”
It gets a little complicated as to whether our children have led us into this gross hedonism or whether we have led them into it. In either case, everything becomes spur of the moment and our interests of a short-term orientation. Then, as our wealth increases, so does our myopia. We are the last to know that we are living on the edge.
Confusing the matter even further, the market continuously blindsides us with new options to distract us from our treadmill status, causing us to possess the latest novelties before they become conventional, be they in electronics, boats, cars, homes, jewelry, or other artificial stimulants to support our hedonism, narcissism, individualism and disorientation.
Now joining the affluent on this merry dash to nowhere are the non-affluent who attempt to mirror the affluent in every way, thinking that the affluent have found the way to welfare, well being, life satisfaction and utility, when they are as lost as we are, only they hide it better than we do because they have more money.
The rational consumer at any level is a fiction while choice is fallible to a fault.
The choices people make do not always accord with what they would judge to be in their best interest because the focus of the choices are on what others have and what others are doing. The most vulnerable to making bad choices on this basis once were considered people making nearly $100,000. They were no longer at the subsistence level, or struggling, but a long way from being wealthy. Yet, the temptation to put on the face of being wealthy proved overwhelming for many. How else could they be envied? So they would rob Peter constantly to pay Paul, and live literally on a shoestring. Now that figure has been increased to the person making nearly $250,000 a year.
When expectations are driven by an outside agenda, the treadmill owns the person.
The problems of self-control are not new for the wealthy or the want to be’s. What kept us off the treadmill and within bounds was a network of self-restraints provided by the state, and by various social and religious institutions.
Peter Drucker, the corporate guru, noted that executives up through and immediately after World War II demonstrated amazing restraint. They paid themselves modestly or only about five to ten times as much as workers on the line. Now, with restraints weakened if not non-existent, executives pay themselves more than a thousand times as much as workers on the line. This is not the exception in society but it has become the rule. Workers at all levels take what they can get without any restraint or conscience. Self-control is gone and people are running faster and faster and going nowhere because they realize they are all on their own. There is no societal safety net.
If anything, we have become married to the products we buy because little stands between what is produced and what is consumed.
How many people do you know that don’t own a cell phone? It is now a necessity, not for emergencies but to be constantly talking and listening for the pure business of talking and listening while walking or running on that treadmill. We have become addicted to timesaving devices, which allow us no time. Who has time to read a book or listen to the sounds of a running brook or to the stillness of nature?
We want desperately to have a good time but a pervasive aspect of our psychology does us in. We cannot stand stillness. We must have noise. We must have new acquisitions to give us pleasure, but they do so for less and less time. We become bored, feel cheated, short-changed, and depressed.
This reminds me of that song, “Is that all there is to love?” So, we’re off to find the next new thing. This process of adaptation has been referred to as the “hedonistic treadmill.”
It is an apt expression, as on the exercise treadmill, we don’t get anywhere; we don’t even get any exercise. The time we spend on the “hedonistic treadmill” is time we don’t spend nurturing our minds and growing as persons, learning to live with others and to appreciate that community is of many hues and many cultures and that is where our nature is truly nurturing.
Affluence, paradoxically, divides community. When a society has enough wealth to live above the subsistence level, close relations flourish. When the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) dominates a society, life is increasingly oriented toward consumption and separation. Wealth becomes the measure of status and not community involvement. Complicating the picture further, family and friends are running faster and faster on this same “hedonistic treadmill” and so are not available to counsel each other on self-control measures, or indeed, to lend a helping hand with other problems. Every man is for himself.
When wealth becomes the primary yardstick of status, other things recede into the background. It results in a kind of arms race of wealth as acquisitions thrive on inequality with the wealthy running faster and faster for longer and longer simply to keep up with their peers.
This is all a measure of stuckness, and the reason I wrote A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.
Mother Nature always wins in the end. Concern for status and competition have found career minded young people preoccupied with their careers with marriage and children taking a backseat to affairs of the heart.
Minorities are now becoming the majority, and moving in to fill the vacuum of those in single-minded pursuit of increased GDP producing negative effects in their personalities, psychology and physical health, not to mention taking the playing field and game away from them.
We always show our prejudices when we want to hide our own ill-advised behavior.
The majority today looks around them and sees people of other cultures and languages dominate the shopping malls and public places, and feel mounting insecurity, which increasingly afflicts both the white-collar and blue-collar classes. They fail to learn from this natural flow but move to enclaves of their own type, which grow smaller and smaller.
But it is impossible to run from a society when you are on the same treadmill as it is, a society in which children are neglected, marriages are unstable, jobs are precarious, trust is absent, and virtue has all but disappeared. You are stuck. It is necessary for you to get off. I got off in 1969 in my thirties, seeing that as I was making more and more ($50,000 without paying any taxes in 1969 dollars from South Africa) and was less and less in control of my life.
It prompted me to write the essay then (1972) that has become A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD today. And it is why I now offer it as a book because what I saw as an inconvenience then has become merging on a catastrophe now.
PREORDER INFORMATION: $20 (S&H included). Checks to: Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 2007
“Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face: from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of earth.”
Thomas Wolfe
LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL
There was a time when the rhythm of the seasons kept our feet on the ground in harmony with Mother Nature. It was a time when there were no pesticides to kill insects that ravaged our crops; when we took in stride the fickle hand of Mother Nature in terms of droughts and floods, tornadoes and hurricanes, erosions and corrosions because we had a bulwark of trees and rocks and natural barriers to control this rapacious disturbance of land and love and life.
We were hearty souls and accepted the unforgiving nature of Mother Nature as most of what and who and where we were was created out of her and went back to her as we came out of her.
It was an authentic cycle, with little invention other than what was necessary for survival, as a reflection of Mother Nature. But today we are so separated from our source of being that we run faster and faster without realizing we are not moving at all.
Everything we have is artificial and a barrier, the mother lode of invention. We are lost and fight desperately to return to the womb of our nature, but have lost our way, and so measure our lost ness in other ways. Today, we call it affluence.
QUALITY OF LIFE
Not only has our affluence failed to make us better off, it may actually have made us worse off. Not only does affluence fail to solve the most basic human problems, it creates new ones. We measure the wrong things; we adopt policies designed to promote the wrong things; we spend our affluence on the wrong things.
We have wasted too much time listening to economists. Milton Friedman, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve and now a private citizen like everyone else, tells a group we are heading for a recession and the Dow Jones Industrials plummet, as they do in Europe and Asia on cue to his words. He no longer is privy to the most current economic data but his celebrity still throws a wide swath.
Studies indicate that wealth is important as people struggle from poverty to subsistence. After that, welfare gains diminish and other aspects of life become more important. But once on this treadmill of wealth producing, it is nigh impossible to get off. It becomes the narcotic of the affluent.
The poverty of imagination kicks in and willful neglect of the evidence to the contrary is ignored.
Economic resources are not final goods. Wealth is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The true end is welfare, well-being, life satisfaction and usefulness. We all know this but something gnaws at us to be better off than the Jones and so we never get off the treadmill. We measure our identity and our worthiness by an ever-expanding display of affluence compounded by the incremental growth of our net income, paycheck to paycheck, or portfolio report to portfolio report.
Since we cannot define welfare, well being, life satisfaction or utility other than in ambiguous terms, we attempt to reduce everything to how much we make, how much we are worth.
What exactly does it mean to have 946 billionaires as reported by Fortune anyway? Or to see that in 1979 0.1 percent of American tax payers (those making $233, 539 or more in adjusted gross income) accounted for 3 percent of income according to the IRS, or that in 2000 the cutoff for the top 0.1 percent was $1.6 million and their share 10 percent of income?
This sounds as if a tremendous gap until you insert inflation. What it does indicate, and Time (March 19, 2007) reports this, is that the rich are assuming the major share of the tax burden. This has resulted in a major reduction in the deficit ($177 billion), but that does not necessarily bode well for the economy.
When wealth and taxes are not equally distributed across society, it is in a position for enormous collapse sometime in the future. Imagine what might happen if the rich, who are now paying 35 percent of the tax burden, suddenly go belly up. It is not a pleasant thought to contemplate.
Go to any sizable city in the Untied States and Europe and you see homeless; you see rundown neighborhoods; you see the poor in impoverished circumstances. Rome crumbled when citizens were distracted with coliseum extravaganzas rather than jobs. Money and welfare, jobs and identity go together. The more money we have the more welfare and well being and life satisfaction we have because we have a job and feel useful. Extremes in any case never serve people because what serves people is what we learned from Mother Nature and that is the rhythm and balance of life.
The paradox of wealth is that it absorbs more attention, more preoccupation with it, allowing less time and capacity to enjoy it. This is as much a function of having far too many choices to make as it is to being exposed to too many opportunities to make bad choices.
I have known a number of people who created wealth quickly – the millionaire kind – and just as quickly were paralyzed by it. Then I’ve known others equally as wealthy that made good choices, but complained about all the choices they left on the table and never exploited. In both cases, they eventually surrendered to depression, while those far less wealthy envied them, having no idea what they had escaped.
Economists tell us that choice shouldn’t work this way, but in my experience this is precisely how it has been seen to work.
Affluence requires more choices and therefore poses more problems that take time and energy to solve. If you can afford a private school for your children, with all its possibilities, your life has just grown a good deal more complicated. It is not only the five-figure fee for your little ones that is required but also your involvement. On this treadmill, the next iteration is a college that requires in the six-figures for a four-year degree, and then all the accoutrements expected at that level and status.
Once we have been blessed with the idea that we are affluent, the principal weakness to our status rears its ugly head, and that is our inability to exert self-control. We have a powerful tendency to indulge our children in all the excesses that now have become necessities of our own self-indulgence.
THE “HEDONISTIC TREADMILL”
It gets a little complicated as to whether our children have led us into this gross hedonism or whether we have led them into it. In either case, everything becomes spur of the moment and our interests of a short-term orientation. Then, as our wealth increases, so does our myopia. We are the last to know that we are living on the edge.
Confusing the matter even further, the market continuously blindsides us with new options to distract us from our treadmill status, causing us to possess the latest novelties before they become conventional, be they in electronics, boats, cars, homes, jewelry, or other artificial stimulants to support our hedonism, narcissism, individualism and disorientation.
Now joining the affluent on this merry dash to nowhere are the non-affluent who attempt to mirror the affluent in every way, thinking that the affluent have found the way to welfare, well being, life satisfaction and utility, when they are as lost as we are, only they hide it better than we do because they have more money.
The rational consumer at any level is a fiction while choice is fallible to a fault.
The choices people make do not always accord with what they would judge to be in their best interest because the focus of the choices are on what others have and what others are doing. The most vulnerable to making bad choices on this basis once were considered people making nearly $100,000. They were no longer at the subsistence level, or struggling, but a long way from being wealthy. Yet, the temptation to put on the face of being wealthy proved overwhelming for many. How else could they be envied? So they would rob Peter constantly to pay Paul, and live literally on a shoestring. Now that figure has been increased to the person making nearly $250,000 a year.
When expectations are driven by an outside agenda, the treadmill owns the person.
The problems of self-control are not new for the wealthy or the want to be’s. What kept us off the treadmill and within bounds was a network of self-restraints provided by the state, and by various social and religious institutions.
Peter Drucker, the corporate guru, noted that executives up through and immediately after World War II demonstrated amazing restraint. They paid themselves modestly or only about five to ten times as much as workers on the line. Now, with restraints weakened if not non-existent, executives pay themselves more than a thousand times as much as workers on the line. This is not the exception in society but it has become the rule. Workers at all levels take what they can get without any restraint or conscience. Self-control is gone and people are running faster and faster and going nowhere because they realize they are all on their own. There is no societal safety net.
If anything, we have become married to the products we buy because little stands between what is produced and what is consumed.
How many people do you know that don’t own a cell phone? It is now a necessity, not for emergencies but to be constantly talking and listening for the pure business of talking and listening while walking or running on that treadmill. We have become addicted to timesaving devices, which allow us no time. Who has time to read a book or listen to the sounds of a running brook or to the stillness of nature?
We want desperately to have a good time but a pervasive aspect of our psychology does us in. We cannot stand stillness. We must have noise. We must have new acquisitions to give us pleasure, but they do so for less and less time. We become bored, feel cheated, short-changed, and depressed.
This reminds me of that song, “Is that all there is to love?” So, we’re off to find the next new thing. This process of adaptation has been referred to as the “hedonistic treadmill.”
It is an apt expression, as on the exercise treadmill, we don’t get anywhere; we don’t even get any exercise. The time we spend on the “hedonistic treadmill” is time we don’t spend nurturing our minds and growing as persons, learning to live with others and to appreciate that community is of many hues and many cultures and that is where our nature is truly nurturing.
Affluence, paradoxically, divides community. When a society has enough wealth to live above the subsistence level, close relations flourish. When the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) dominates a society, life is increasingly oriented toward consumption and separation. Wealth becomes the measure of status and not community involvement. Complicating the picture further, family and friends are running faster and faster on this same “hedonistic treadmill” and so are not available to counsel each other on self-control measures, or indeed, to lend a helping hand with other problems. Every man is for himself.
When wealth becomes the primary yardstick of status, other things recede into the background. It results in a kind of arms race of wealth as acquisitions thrive on inequality with the wealthy running faster and faster for longer and longer simply to keep up with their peers.
This is all a measure of stuckness, and the reason I wrote A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.
Mother Nature always wins in the end. Concern for status and competition have found career minded young people preoccupied with their careers with marriage and children taking a backseat to affairs of the heart.
Minorities are now becoming the majority, and moving in to fill the vacuum of those in single-minded pursuit of increased GDP producing negative effects in their personalities, psychology and physical health, not to mention taking the playing field and game away from them.
We always show our prejudices when we want to hide our own ill-advised behavior.
The majority today looks around them and sees people of other cultures and languages dominate the shopping malls and public places, and feel mounting insecurity, which increasingly afflicts both the white-collar and blue-collar classes. They fail to learn from this natural flow but move to enclaves of their own type, which grow smaller and smaller.
But it is impossible to run from a society when you are on the same treadmill as it is, a society in which children are neglected, marriages are unstable, jobs are precarious, trust is absent, and virtue has all but disappeared. You are stuck. It is necessary for you to get off. I got off in 1969 in my thirties, seeing that as I was making more and more ($50,000 without paying any taxes in 1969 dollars from South Africa) and was less and less in control of my life.
It prompted me to write the essay then (1972) that has become A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD today. And it is why I now offer it as a book because what I saw as an inconvenience then has become merging on a catastrophe now.
PREORDER INFORMATION: $20 (S&H included). Checks to: Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504.
Thursday, March 01, 2007
A VARIATION OF MUNCHAUSEN SYNDROME BY PROXY
NOTE: This is an excerpt from my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007)
A VARIATION OF MUNCHAUSEN SYNDROME BY PROXY
“A woman who experts said has a rare mental disorder has been sentenced to more than 15 years in prison after admitting she injected fecal matter into her infant daughter. She liked the attention that her daughter’s sickness generated around her.”
http://www.google.com/, January 31, 2007
We associate this disease, Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, with parents who cause injuries to their children to bring attention to themselves. It is primarily physical harm that is visible and draws immediate attention and sympathy to the parents who must deal with their children’s suffering.
I see a variation of this disease in a wider connection. I see us injecting ourselves with our own venom to draw attention and sympathy to our self-indulgent plight. This is easier than accepting our struggles and wrestling with our limitations to take appropriate action. We have a weakness for theatre. Some might call it a failure to grow up.
CONVERSATION WITH AN AUHTOR FRIEND
Recently, I had occasion to see a writer friend that I hadn’t seen in over a decade. A brilliant engineer with one hundred patents to his name, he has written three compelling books on what he calls “the new plague.” They deal with organization complexity and the failure of organization to make appropriate adjustments to complexity, resulting in debilitating entropy: translation, a “sick society.”
His first words in greeting, “Do you still write angry?”
There is not an appropriate comeback without appearing defensive, so I answered honestly, “If I do, I don’t feel as angry as I did as a young man. I see we’re stuck. I sense this is because we hide behind these charges of being angry or critical or whatever without taking the time to get inside the language to see if there is any substance to these charges.”
“Now you’re sounding like a social scientist. I guess you’ve left your engineering behind.”
“I hope not. But being stuck I see is indisputable. I’ve taken a look back to see ahead using some famous voices of the past to show we haven’t moved from where they saw us.”
“You think this will trigger some action?”
“Our engineering taught us that system failures are not the result of occasional glitches but chronic problems. Our sick culture is our chronic problem.”
“So?”
“So that is my thesis. We keep reinjecting ourselves with the same poisons, and then crying woe is me.”
“Don’t you see your vanity in this? Who are you to cry, ‘wolf’? Nobody cares what Jim Fisher thinks. You might better feed your money to the birds.”
“William,” I said, “if money were my motivation, I wouldn’t be writing what Alan Watts calls, ‘a society burning up rubber going nowhere with its foot to the floor on the brake and accelerator at once’ and Bill Buckley refers to as simply ‘forward inertia.’ You can’t get more stuck than that.”
“So, now you’re a Zen Watts and a cant Buckley.”
“Insofar as they are or were outsiders, yes, but only in that sense. I’m too old to go on the stump with my ideas, but sufficiently conscious to write, so that’s what I do.”
“Yes, I see that.”
With that, we went off into less controversial concerns with a promise to keep in touch.
THE ULTIMATE DIDACTIC
Writers are not only recorders of events but alarmists as well, as they attempt to get our attention one way or another. Over the years, I’ve read thousands of pieces of information, and have gleaned patterns of a consistent theme. You could change the dates and put them on the newsstand tomorrow without anyone knowing the difference, confirming our being stuck:
Psychology Today (August 1969) “The demonics of Post-Freudian man.” Rollo May’s book “Love and Will” is used to point out that we are all part of a schizoid world, but seemingly powerless to do anything about it. This world has never left us.
US News & World Report (September 3, 1979) “New Breed of Workers.” The piece sees this new breed as prosperous, restless and demanding. The only thing that has changed is the software.
Today’s Office (July 1983) “Quality of Work Life: Labor’s Love Found” with a caption of two automobile bumper stickers reading, “I love my employees” and “I love my job.” QWL was the prevalent 1980s human resources theme, which led to complacency rather than contribution in work. Delta Air Lines’ employees gave the company a jumbo jet; today Delta lies in ruin. An adversary view of this I gave at a conference nearly got me fired.
Business Week (July 14, 1986) “Japan In America.” The cover shows an American with a Japanese flag across the brim of his hardhat. The article sounds the alarm that Japanese management is integral to workers. It lays the bombshell that workers work smarter when management pays attention to their ideas. The message was largely ignored. Today (2007) Toyota owns the American automotive industry. It left Chrysler in the dust, bumped Ford aside as if it wasn’t there, and is now climbing up GM’s back as GM staggers forward on bankrupt legs.
International Business Week (November 3, 1986) “Chrysler’s Next Act.” The cover shows CEO Lee Iacocca undraping a new automobile with the caption: “Sure, the company’s big comeback turned Lee Iacocca into a hero. But Chrysler needs a new strategy, and Iacocca has plenty of ideas.” The article supports the myth of the “great man” theory of leadership with the Chrysler sphinx rising from its ashes with Iacocca at the helm. Leadership is a collective conscience dedicated to a consensus purpose, a lesson American industry has not yet learned.
Newsweek (July 4, 1988) “Freud’s Enduring Legacy: How His Ideas Still Shape Psychotherapy.” A series of articles go into how Freud’s teachings still exert influence, how they sustain the theoretical debate, and how such extremists as Jacques Lacan use neo-Freudianism to promote anti-humanism. The Freud focus illustrates the dearth of ideas since then, as little has changed.
Fortune (February 27, 1989) “America’s Toughest Bosses (Frank Lorenzo of Texas Air on the cover): Meet Seven of the Steeliest Taskmasters in Business, and Count Your Blessings.” The article is a hagiography of the great leader myth of fourteen-hour working days, six days a week, implying this is necessary to keep their companies afloat. This myth of leadership rose out of WWII and survives to this day.
Time (August 28, 1995) “20th Century Blues: Stress, anxiety, depression; the new science of evolutionary psychology finds the roots of modern maladies in our genes.” The article uses the word “science” with a casualness that is no longer surprising. It claims, “the problem is that too little of our ‘social’ contact is social in the natural, intimate sense of the word.” Where is it to be found? One must dig for clues like paleontologists into the genes. The piece claims the ultimate in isolation technologies is television. The galloping ghost of cyberspace or cell phone mania was not yet on the radar.
Time (February 19, 1996) “The Golden Geeks.” The cover shows a barefoot Marc Andreessen sitting on a throne in jeans and a polo shirt with the cocky grin of the “instantaire” on his face. The article profiles him along with Steve Jobs, Jeff Braun, Doug Colbeth, and Bill Schrader. They all look happy, full of themselves and on top of the world, as if instant fame and fortune are perfect painkillers to “20th century blues.” But where are most of them now?
Time (September 16, 1996) “Whose Web Will It Be?” The cover is the face of Bill Gates in a spider’s web with his trophies of Apple, IBM, and Netscape. The caption reads: “He conquered the computer world. Now he wants the Internet. If Microsoft overwhelms Netscape, Bill Gates could rule the Information Age.” The article is titled “Winner take all” with a quote from the war guru Karl von Clausewitz: “War belongs to the province of business competition, which is also the conflict of human interests.” IBM was slow out of the blocks with the pc; Microsoft slow out of the gate to cyberspace; Google eclipsed them both. The bunny jump continues with the only question: who is behind door number four?
Time (December 31, 1999) “Person of the Century.” The cover is a full-face picture of Albert Einstein with those knowing sad eyes like a hound dog that sees with sorrow into the new century. What was beautiful about this man, something that is missing now, is that he combined the deep sense of moral wisdom with a total indifference to convention. Einstein was an authentic man in a Teflon age.
The stories don’t change because we are stuck. As stress, anxiety and depression escalate, what do we do? We invent a new science. Today it is evolutionary psychology; tomorrow it will be genetic psychology. There is little interest in discovering the chronic causes of our sickness. It is too depressing; more fun to put our minds and hearts at ease inventing new toys and new sciences.
Find and destroy the offending gene pool and man will be once again able to go forward unimpeded in his quest for happiness. The irony is that we fail to see the sickness in this. It seldom occurs to us that the maze we are in is the maze we have created and therefore only we have the key to the locked door.
These narratives that bounce off our psyches are essentially insiders’ dictums, insiders’ interpretations of the dramas of our times. They see it as their role to protect the status quo by reinjecting us with its cultural malaise, and then as we falter, pointing out how they are the voice of our salvation. They burn the village to save it. They rob our treasurer of its wealth to fight wars they have provoked and which we are to fight. They poison us with fear and then assign themselves as its alleviators, variations of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.
WHO STIRS THE DRINK?
The paradox is that insiders capture our attention while outsiders stir the drink. Outsiders write most of the books with insiders’ names on the jackets. They write the speeches, the strategy briefs, and the tactical maneuvers of the generals, CEOs, politicians, educators, clerics, and television commentators. They remain essentially invisible mesmerized by their nearness to power while, paradoxically, unaware of their own.
This is played out with bizarre finality in the engineering community. The modern world is a product of the engineering mind. Yet while they created this world, it does not belong to them. It has been stolen from them.
Steven Jobs was designing video games for Atari, while his engineering buddy Stephen Wozniak was working on pocket calculators for Hewlett-Packard. Wozniak designed a personal computer but couldn’t get HP to produce and market it. Jobs was touring a Xerox facility in 1979 when, suddenly, his world changed.
The Xerox’s computer graphic screen, overlapping popup windows, icons, fonts, and mouse immediately intrigued him. He found himself leaping and jumping around the room, yelling, “Why aren’t you doing something with this?” The implication was, “If you don’t, I will,” and of course he did.
The Xerox engineers who designed the computer didn’t have the will, way or persuasive skills to convince Xerox management that it was sitting on gold.
In the 1980s, IBM was asleep at the wheel of the pc surge. It lost more than $70 billion of stock valuation and eliminated more than 200,000 jobs. In a panic, it rushed to get into the computer business by putting together existing components and technology instead of launching into complete reengineering. It looked for an operating system and decided on Digital Research whose operating system CP/M was the market leader for personal computers at the time.
But IBM could not come to agreement with the firm’s engineering head. He was out flying his plane. His wife, Dorothy McEwen, who handled the business end, instead met with IBM representatives and rejected its offer as too lopsided to IBM. Her main concern was the “nondisclosure” agreement required by IBM, which would, as she saw it, have allowed IBM to hear about DR’s products, and then go out and duplicate them on its own.
Waiting in the wings was a fledgling company, Microsoft, which had more chutzpah than cutting edge technology. It could not say “yes” fast enough. It looked at the contract as a vehicle that would allow it to sell its real products, the programming languages. So, late in 1980, IBM signed the agreement that would turn Bill Gates, and his partners, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer into multi-billionaires.
To satisfy IBM, Microsoft had to do some stealing, posthaste. It bought the rights to what was then called the “Quick and Dirty Operating System” (QDOS) from the small firm, Seattle Computer. Microsoft first paid $25,000 for non-exclusive rights. SC had no idea how valuable DOS would become.
Microsoft then quickly paid an additional $50,000 for exclusive rights. In 1986, six years later, Microsoft paid Seattle Computer nearly $1 million to settle a dispute over the rights to DOS. Microsoft was now home free and on its way.
This is a common story throughout the history of engineering. It has been finessed and flummoxed by opportunists since the discovery of the wheel. Engineers have shown a lack of moxie and bravado when it has come to selling their ideas. That is due, in part, because they reason from the general to the particular (deduction), whereas marketing types reason from the particular to the general (induction). Engineering is a conforming discipline whereas the rebel defies convention. No surprise, Jobs was a college drop out; Gates was, too. Their strengths were in selling, not inventing or building. And so it has been to the present day.
Several years ago, I wrote “The Lost Soul of the Engineer” (Short-Circuit Spring 1993) in which I observed engineers have a fatal attraction for being exploited. This inclination is derived from their conformist education in which skills are honed out with well-established engineering and mathematical principles that can easily be replicated and therefore are indisputable.
It results in hard wiring to stay and not stray from consistency. While developing their essence to the fullest, their personality is left vulnerable to attack on all sides. They are outsiders in which insiders can exploit them at will, and unfortunately do.
A consistent complaint of engineers is that they are under utilized. It never occurs to them that it is their fault. They expect their value to be self-evident and appreciated.
Engineers are not decisive because they don’t see decision-making as part of their job. They are problem solvers that are easily thrown off stride by turf wars or the politics incidental to perks and salary concerns. Consequently, pay them a dollar more an hour than they can afford to quit and you own them.
Their tentative nature surfaces if found in a position of authority. This finds them looking for more data to verify with a mania for bottom line perfection. It is no accident that major corporations manned by engineers and scientists seldom show the flexibility to deal with sudden disruptive change.
They fall back on what they know, failing to trust their instincts, often putting their behavior on a collision course with the unexpected. Take American transportation. This industry is dominated by CEOs with engineering backgrounds, and is struggling.
As Plato might observe, engineers have the power to see into their own soul, but they must be goaded into looking in the right direction. These technology creators of the modern world have spurned responsibility for its chaos. They have allowed technocrats and entrepreneurs to possess, exploit and manage it. Fault them not as they have come to this advantage by default.
Obviously, not all engineers are outsiders. But the general perception is that they have allowed insiders to run with their ideas polluting society with the wastes of their creation. We see this in automobile exhaust emissions, nuclear waste, pesticides, the weapons of mass destruction, indeed, all the toys and tools of the electronic age. Engineers have taken a subservient role poisoned by passivity, when they should be stirring the drink.
Their contempt for things non-engineering has put them in a cage of their own making, and society with them. Society is sick because it is out-of-control. It is out-of-control because the designers and builders of the modern world are waiting for someone else to demonstrate moral authority. It has become the age of science sublimated to technology with scientists and engineers acting like children, and we with them, passively consuming our own waste.
This plays out in a bizarre way. We applaud scientists and engineers for their temporary cures of diseases that are man made. These diseases then metastasize to new illnesses as we fail to accept the connection of social behavior with our chronic prone culture. On the surface, it appears we are playing catch up, but in fact we are only running faster in place.
A BRIDGE TOO FAR – A CASE IN POINT
The distressing nature of this futile war was never made more apparent than when I was invited to the Charles Stark Draper Laboratories (CSDL) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts to work with their scientists and engineers.
At the time, I was an organizational development (OD) psychologist at Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida. The director of CSDL had read an article of mine reprinted from a paper given at the National Conference of the Institute of Printed Circuits (Dallas, Texas October 1981). He invited me to spend a couple weeks with his people whom he believed could benefit from such exposure.
The mind is a strange playground. It is only amenable to information presented that is consistent with information already there. If information cannot pass through that filter and make connection with that knowledge base, it is rejected. Leon Festinger had much to say about that with his cognitive dissonance theory.
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD has endeavored to show how social philosophers have attempted to penetrate this barrier with reason. In that rendering, they found no need to push the envelope to restructure the predominant mental mindset of the time, satisfied to turn that over to others to solve. That was then; this is now.
Engineers and scientists have created an educated constituency, and an educated workforce programmed within the limits of linear logic and cognitive comprehension but ill prepared to deal with a sick, topsy-turvy irrational world where chaos has trumped order, and reason has taken a holiday.
They have created the modern world, made the inventions, discovered DNA, created the Internet, and other remarkable innovations, only to be pushed aside by the opportunists to exploit this chaos with irrational glee. This has left these programmed rationalists behind, traumatized and confounded by the out-of-control world they have spawned. That was apparent in 1983 with my visit to MIT, a citadel of rationalists, who lived by the purity of algorithms. They became quickly unglued when I challenged them to think differently about common problems of behavior, mainly their own.
Before I share that visit with you, I should mention that my boss, the late Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth, cautioned the director that he should know, up front, that my style was unconventional, and to be patient as the chaos I created would ultimately settle into a surprising order. Then privately, he said to me, “Don’t piss them off, hear me?”
“Well, maybe I shouldn’t go,” I said.
“No, no,” he replied, “I’ve already warned the director you’re a guy in their face, and he said, ‘good, they need that.’” I hoped he meant it.
* * * * * *
Here I was, a tall blue-eyed blond Irishman from the Midwest, with a land grant state institutional education, finding myself among the country’s engineering and scientific elite.
When I entered the conference room, I saw the tables had been arranged in a “U” shaped pattern with twenty-six bored faces looking up at me. The director introduces me stating that I would be working with them for the next few weeks. A groan greeted the news. To my chagrin, nothing was said about my role. With that, the director went to the back of the room, folded his arms across his chest, and waited for me to take over.
“Good morning,” I said with a forced smile.
“What’s good about it?” somebody said. “I’ve got work to do. What am I doing here?”
“Why do you think you’re here?” I countered.
“Oh, you’re going to play that game with us, huh?”
I didn’t answer.
“Well, I suppose you’re here because my boss wants you here.” He looked to the back of the room.
“No,” I answered, “I don’t think that would be accurate.”
He looked at his colleagues, and said, “Here that?” And then with a smug attempt to mock my voice, he added, “He doesn’t think that’s accurate.” This was greeted with laughter. When the laughter subsided, he continued, “He wants me to ask what he means by accurate.”
I smiled, and said, “That would help.”
Another guy chirped, “I don’t want to be disrespectful, Dr. Fisher, but I’m a little pissed off bringing somebody from the outside to tell us what we should and shouldn’t do. What I’d like to know is who brought you here?”
Again, I didn’t say anything.
Somebody else chimed in, “Why don’t you answer the man?”
“Why don’t you answer him?” I said.
“He asked you, not me.”
“True, the question was directed at me but it was all about you, all of you. You brought me here.”
They sat there combatively, but without another word.
“Yes,” I continued, “it’s about all of you. I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t here, and you wouldn’t be here,” pointing to the whole assembly, “unless there was a reason for me to be here.”
“Oh, he’s going to go Aristotelian on us.”
Again, I said nothing.
“Okay,” somebody said, “we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. You tell us what this is all about.”
“It is just what I said. You brought me here. It is all about you.”
“I didn’t bring you here,” some female chimed in for the first time.
I smiled again, and said, “Oh, but miss, you did. And so did you and you and you,” and as I said this my finger pointing at each of them about the room as my voice rose to a crescendo. Quite remarkably, all of a sudden they were sitting back on their seats with their arms folded across their chests.
Very quickly, with that little dramatization, they went from the offense to the defense. They looked like the obedient little boys and girls that they were programmed to be underneath the façade of combativeness.
More consoling, I continued, “Let me ask you a question. How many of you in this room have been to Clearwater, Florida?” One hand went up, the director’s. “Let me ask you another question, how would you on a scale of ten describe the design of your ring laser gyro that is being built in Clearwater?”
“Fifteen,” somebody said.
“Come on now, honestly, on a scale of one to ten where do you see your design.”
“Ten plus,” somebody answered.
“Okay, I’ll accept that. How many of you agree?” All hands went up. “You take pride in the excellence of your design.” They nodded. “Now here is another question, if this is such a perfected design, why is it failing to be built to specifications and on schedule, but instead requires extensive rework producing tons of scrap with the US Navy unhappy with CSDL as well as Clearwater?”
“Stands to reason, doesn’t it, that’s because you’ve got numbskulls building it down there.” Laughter.
Somebody else yelled, “You’ve got it!”
Again, I stood there silently.
“Don’t you agree?” my initial questioner asked.
I answered, “I don’t have the foggiest notion. You see, I don’t have the expertise to agree or disagree. And by the way, how do you know they are numbskulls if you’ve never observed their work. That doesn’t sound very scientific to me.” Nobody replied.
At this point, I handed out a book I had put together for this purpose including articles I had previously written, which was titled “Teaming: Productivity Through Cooperation.” I copyrighted it, which caused me some embarrassment later as Honeywell pointed out that it owned my work, all of it, by my initial employment agreement. Technical publications at Honeywell, however, had delighted in putting this book together, and had gone out of their way to make it an attractive document.
“Read this, and I’ll see you tomorrow,” and with that I turned and left the room. They sat there somewhat stunned as the afternoon was dedicated to this purpose and we had been together for only a little over an hour.
When I talked to the director later that day, he said, “You were a little tough on them weren’t you?”
“Not nearly as tough as they are on themselves. Watch what happens tomorrow.”
* * * * * *
The morning came, everyone was there bright and early, and like the eager beavers they are, they were all at full attention for Dr. Fisher from Clearwater, Florida anxious to learn why he was there. He had passed the initial test, now this was his second.
Without preamble, I began, “Your design of these ring gyro systems that are being built one thousand miles away has proven to be a bridge too far.”
They all leaned forward on their chairs mulling over that statement, but said nothing. “It has become apparent that for whatever reason the systems designed cannot be built as designed. There is a fundamental flaw to this thousand-mile gap. Now, yesterday I mentioned this and you were certain it was not your problem, but theirs. I don’t sense that same confidence today.”
Again, no one said a word but literally sat on their hands, not across their chests as they had ended the previous day. Finally, I asked, “What do you make of that, and what can we do about it?”
One of the interesting phenomena of people used to taking orders, when given an opportunity to create the orders to be taken, there is a mismatch between the information in their heads and how to conceptualize it into an action plan. This is because they are trained tacticians and not strategists. They are programmed to think hierarchically and not laterally, to react to orders rather than create action plans irrespective of the orders given, to see only their role in the part and not the whole. Their apparent compliance was not compliance at all, but a reflection of being in unfamiliar territory.
Engineers and scientists have had the rebel carved out of their personality quite early by a rationally dominated objective quantitative education. The mask of conformity has replaced the rebel. It is therefore difficult for them to think qualitatively and subjectively without guilt. I was now in nowhere land in the minefield of nowhere man where vulnerability is at its highest, which behooved me to go gently and prudently forward.
Then somebody said, “Maybe it is simply a matter of competence down there. You know, we don’t even know if there are engineers working on our designs.”
“You may very well have a point. But how do you know that for sure?”
“Well, it stands to reason, if they can’t built it what other explanation can there be?”
“What other reason can you think of?”
Silence.
“It is clear they have a problem. But we can beat our heads against the wall forever, and still not solve it, right?” Another voice offered. More nods of agreement.
What may seem obvious to the reader was not obvious to this elite assembly. Role demands and self-demands were perceived in specific and structured terms of the part, and not the whole. I was leading them to the water but they refused to drink.
“Wrong!” I said.
“Wrong?” Their voices rose in unison.
“Yes, wrong, because we have a problem. I’ve talked to them in Clearwater, and they say, ‘We don’t have a problem, they have a problem,’ meaning you, all of you sitting here have a problem.”
“WE have a problem? That’s beautiful, that’s a good one.”
“YOU have a problem because if you cannot design something that can be replicated and built then YOU have failed, and it should give you little satisfaction that Clearwater has failed with YOU.”
Somebody said, “I don’t have to take this. I’m going.”
I said, “Goodbye!” He didn’t get up. I looked over this engineer’s head at the director and he looked as if he were bleeding to death. I’m sure he was wondering what he had let himself in for. My boss had told him, “Fisher doesn’t use a typical approach. He screws with your head, but in the end he screws it on pretty good. So just let him do his thing and let it go as it does.” The director was doing just that.
“So, you’re going to tell us what the problem is.”
“No, I’m going to ask another question.”
Somebody interrupted, “I told you he was a shrink. He answers a question with a question; our bosses think we’re nuts.” Everybody laughed.
I just smiled. “Yesterday I asked how many of you had spent any time in Clearwater and none of you had. So, none of you know what the difficulties are with building your designs, other than through memos, as none of you know your counterparts as persons in the flesh. What’s more, you have little conception of how the build process is set up there other than in slide presentations. Getting to know the people, coming to understand the production problems, the glitches in the build process can only be understood if you are down there, and not up here. You’re all essentially virgins to that reality.”
“Maybe twenty-five,” somebody said. Everyone laughed.
They started to relax. When you can laugh with yourself rather than at yourself, you have made a turn to possible communication with others.
“Okay,” I said, “then that is one of the problems, getting you face-to-face with your counterparts. That is being arranged for most if not all of you by bringing some people from Clearwater up and sending some of you down, and then establishing a monthly roundtable of personnel from both places to define specific concerns of the moment.”
“And the other problem?”
I smiled. “That is why I’m here. How many have read my book?” All hands were raised.
“My wife’s a psychologist,” one person offered, “the stuff on Freudian psychology she’d never seen explained more plainly.”
“Glad to hear that,” I answered.
“She said listen to this guy. I think he can be useful.”
“We’ll see about that,” I answered.
Someone yelled, “Yeah, we’ll see about that!”
“Well, we’re going to start this afternoon doing that by discussing the framework of will.” Groans. “Now, this is not going to be heavy. To get you into the frame of each session, we’ll start with an abstract idea to build to mutual self-understanding. Then, we’ll move quickly into the concrete business of creating useful tools for that purpose.
“We will spend about an hour a session on each of the nine topics covered.” I opened the book to the table of contents. “After the framework of will, we’ll move on to team building, then working relationships in a team, choosing a leadership style, and so on.
“We will break up into three teams. Since we have only 26 participants, I will rotate replacing the ninth member of the team. You’ll each also rotate the team leader.
“Starting tomorrow, after the initial discussion, one of the teams will assemble in the middle of the room to conduct a team meeting with the rest of us as observers. The team will create a meeting objective and agenda on any subject of interest. We will comment on how successful group participation and joint problem solving was facilitated. Each of you will eventually be a team leader with the goal to move the meeting along to its objective without getting anyone mad or causing them to leave.”
Laughter, and then someone added, “Easy for you to say.”
I continued, “We will be looking for polite exchange rather than violent confrontation. Our culture finds us complaining infrequently but violently rather than frequently and politely. We will try to reverse that tendency here. Moreover, we are not promoting harmony, but for people to express their will, and for others to listen respectfully, and feedback honestly what they have heard for clarification and understanding. We will deal with our suspicions and address our concerns in the interest to communicate, which then leads naturally to cooperation. That is our objective.”
They were then instructed to create their teams and spend the balance of the session on organizing their team presentations.
* * * * * *
Team meetings were for thirty minutes or so, followed by a fifteen-minute critique of the meeting by the observers. After a fifteen-minute break, we moved on to the next presentation. This became the format for the next two weeks. Meetings were held from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. This allowed participants time to return to their workstations, offices and labs to handle pressing matters. It also allowed me time to schedule meetings with each of the twenty-six for a one-on-one, interviewing some of them more than once at their request.
Each day was electrifying as they clearly found enjoyment in escaping their normal routines to discover social competence that appeared a surprise to them. You never saw twenty-six adults more animated in this contrived setting. It was clearly fun as well as eye opening. I thought they would see it too much like school, but that never happened. They were too involved in the process.
At the end of these breakout group meetings, each person was given an opportunity with the final full assembly to express what they had derived from the experience. Their candor can be summed up in one word: authentic. No one felt a need to play cute.
* * * * * *
My final meeting was with the director. His first comment: They really liked you.”
“They like me now,” I said, “Because this has all been fun and new. You have problems here. It is not only the way you operate but the way you are designed to operate.”
“You’re talking about Clearwater and a bridge too far, right?” recalling that expression.
“I’m talking about these twin towers and the bridge between them; that is also a bridge too far. People don’t have an office or lab next door, but around the bend.”
“And that is a problem?”
“It seems to be.” Then I told him of the physicist around the bend from the biochemist who hadn’t spoken to each other in twenty years. Secretaries handle exchanges. I noted elitism was rampant, suggesting it was facilitated by the design of the buildings. I ended with, “You are not ergonomically structured to integration here much less with Clearwater.”
His arms were folded tightly across his chest but he said nothing.
“What do you think they hold in common?”
“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”
“They don’t like each other very much. They break out into functional disciplines. This is broken down further into levels of competence and incompetence within and between disciplines, a pettiness supreme. They expended amazing amounts of energy apprising me of this fact. I asked one why he felt that way, and said nobody understood him or his discipline. Another wondered if other disciplines were even science.
“I found this same attitude across all disciplines. Here some technicians have master’s degrees while nearly everyone else has one or more Ph.D. degrees, yet none would seem to have a firm hold on their emotions.”
“It’s a tough intellectual community.”
“It’s a community out of balance, sir,” and before he could comment, “with a strong ego and weak affect. They’ve developed their talents at the expense of their personalities, failing to see that both work best when in balance.”
“Godamn it Fisher, what’s your point?”
“What does tough intellectual community mean to you?”
“That they are very competent, know their jobs.”
“Yes, I’m sure that is true, but ‘tough intellectual community’ is meaningless psychobabble. It doesn’t move the pointer across the page.”
“I’m starting to see your point. It is not enough to be competent and know your job if you can’t work together.”
“Exactly! They think to work well together they must like each other. Not necessary. Accept what each other brings to the party, yes, and respect each other for it, but they don’t have to like each other. Teamwork is not marriage; it is seeing clearly the common objective and pursuing it with due diligence.”
“I can see that.”
“They must be confrontational. That is not natural to them. They thought they could put me quickly on a plane back to Clearwater when they started sending barbs over my bow, but that was precisely what I needed to get this thing off the ground. You said they liked me. As you can see from what I’ve said, liking me is not relevant. More relevant, did I seed the change process?”
“Do you think you did?”
“Not if this is the end. This is the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end, whatever way you want to see it, but it is up to them now, and you.”
“But you’re an outsider. How can I get an insider to follow up with where you’ve left off?”
I laughed.
“What’s so funny?"
“I started out in research and development as a chemist. They saw me as an HR type with a Ph.D. in psychology. They didn’t sense I had been a practicing chemical engineer in the field as well as a chemist in the laboratory. I know the smell of them. Not one of them picked up my odor. They hide behind their knowledge and are protected from social confusion by staying safely in their sanctuary. I would suggest you acquire an OD consultant to untangle this web of denial and deceit.”
* * * * * *
Then I told the director a story of the false positive of the purity of design. A former employer of mine had developed a process for making tetraethyl and tetra methyl lead as catalysts for refining crude oil. It was a fraction of the cost of the established German Grignard Process. Customers were lined up across the world. A factory was built in Freeport, Texas largely with borrowed money. Unfortunately, the process was too pure and the factory blew up from spontaneous combustion.
It was the 1960s. The company was undergoing unprecedented growth. This accident stopped it in its tracks. Purity was never considered a problem. But purity was a contingency that had to be addressed and the process adjusted. “If CSDL can adjust its design to fit Clearwater’s restrictions,” I said, “you will reduce that thousand miles to being essentially face-to-face.” And it happened. Some balance was restored in Cambridge, while Clearwater successfully commenced to build their designs
THE MIND OF THE TIME IS OFF ITS AXIS
A variation of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy is obviously uncomfortable for readers to consider because it is a reprehensible disease in which harm is done to one to create the advantage of attention for another. What could be more reprehensible than injecting fetal material into the vulnerable? I see cheating, lying, conning, stealing, and bearing false witness against others as reprehensible if not equally so, and much more common.
When our essence is developed and our personality injected with its own venom, or visa versa, it makes for a sickness of the soul of the most debilitating kind.
At a time when the world spins on the engineering mind, it is spinning out of control and off its axis. The evidence is that engineers and scientists create out of their essence and then are finessed by high-testosterone A type personalities. These enterprising characters convince them that they have no business sense; that they need them to show them the way. They blindside these highly trained people in their $7,000 suits by Armani or Prada or Brioni or Kiton while giving the impression that “engineers reign supreme.”
Engineers are then prodded and pushed to impossible schedules to produce the next great electronic toy for the masses in a “culture of innovation.” Tracy Kidder captured this perfectly in “The Soul of Machine” (1981), in which an engineering team worked maddening hours, sometimes 24-hour marathon sessions, to produce a cutting-edge minicomputer only to be dismantled and shredded once the objective was accomplished.
You ask yourself why would such brilliant people allow this to happen? The same answer comes to mind as to why people allowed the Holocaust, global warming, terrorism, or the national debt to soar.
“When people are confronted with an overwhelming threat and don’t see a solution,” writes Ross Gelbspan (The Heat is On 1998), “it makes them feel impotent. So they shrug it off or go into deliberate denial.”
Even Kidder was ambivalent about these engineers seeing them as “heroes,” and their efforts as “heroic.” It would seem, however, they have more in common than we would like with Frederick Winslow Taylor’s description of steelworkers nearly a century ago in “Scientific Management” (1911):
“One of the very first requirements for man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles an ox than any other type.”
Joseph Finder in “Paranoia” (2004) novelizes how a software engineer is blackmailed into spying on a competitor. It is war of another kind with the wheelers and dealers having no compunction to promote technology for their rapacious gain using the poison of terror and intimidation of the best and the brightest to satisfy their ends.
Dropouts rule this world of the electronics of cyberspace. Either wearing khakis, polo shirts and sandals or Armani suits look past the disguises, and you see the nervous energy, ganglions over-caffeinated and the fast talk to suggest quick minds. Whatever the education, high tech people like to talk like engineers, going naturally into acronyms and engineering jargon.
Once engineers feel in safe territory they’ll do their bidding. And who are these new “robber barons”? They are secular popes with an ecclesiastical curia, and clerical hierarchy of ubiquitous promoters, endorsers and enforcers who have an umbilicus connection to their passionate parishioner buyers worldwide.
No one questions the wisdom of the Information Age or its electronic dogma because it pervades the universe as the new religion with the certainty that once was only that of the Roman Catholic Church of the Middle Ages.
The common denominator of this reality is that although engineers design the wonders of the world they seldom control, much less profit from them. This is not a recent situation. Thomas Edison, who is revered in our society, was not an engineer but self-educated, and a compulsive stealer of other people’s ideas. No one knew this better than Nikola Tesla, one of the greatest inventors the world has ever known. Called a madman by some, a genius by others, and an enigma by nearly everyone, he was certainly one of the strangest of scientists. Margaret Cheney captures this in “Tesla: Man Out of Time” (1981). He introduced the fundamentals to robotry, computers, and missile science, and helped pave the way for such space-age technologies as satellites, microwaves, beam weapons, and nuclear fusion. Yet, even with his considerable contributions he remains practically unknown as compared to his adversary, Edison. Edison attempted to sabotage his discovery of alternating current (A/C) by electrocuting elephants with it to show its harmful effects, when A/C was actually much safer than D/C.
* * * * * *
There is an arrogance to essence that doesn’t see a need for comparable attention to personality. Seldom will you find an engineer, for example, who will admit to reading fiction, which is actually a laboratory of the heart, and the heart gets us in a lot more trouble than the head ever has.
Take the case of the Astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak. The 43-year-old Naval Academy graduate and married mother of three managed a demanding career, motherhood and the military, only to come crashing down to the reality that the mind has a heart. She is currently the source of late night television jokes and newspaper editorial cartoons. It is the way we handle our societal sickness: by fogging it up with misdirection.
Little attention is paid to the remarkable accomplishment of this young lady. She passed through the brutal 50-year-old Darwinian screening process of NASA, to be a shuttle flight veteran and brilliant engineer. Her problem is that she suffered a painful divorce and fell in love with another Astronaut, divorced Captain William Oefelein, 41, whose current girlfriend was stationed 900-miles from Houston in Orlando.
Mrs. Nowak rushed across this distance wearing space diapers so that she wouldn’t have to have pit stops along the way. Then in a bizarre fashion she threatened Air Force Captain Colleen Shipman, single and 30, allegedly with murder on her mind.
As we have discussed, a scientific and engineering education is highly programmed to deterministic solutions. One of the beauties of such an education and its exercise is that it is essentially clean of emotionalism. We can develop our essence, our genetic gifts for quantitative thinking unencumbered with the messiness and aberrancy of personality.
Our passion for science and mathematics is almost religious because we are in control. We don’t have to deal with the spuriousness of the soft sciences. What we formulate in Clinton, Iowa can be replicated in Hong Kong. What the formula tells us today will not vary with the weather or any elemental change tomorrow, at least not mathematically, as the algorithms are truth personified.
It is a heady thing to exercise such control, a place for everything and everything in its place, and have the certainty of not only control but also that there is common agreement with our findings. There is consensus without any emotional wrangling with suspicion or disagreement or criticism. The facts speak for themselves.
Unfortunately, we have a tendency, those of us schooled in the sciences, to expect life to fall at our feet with the same consistency. When it doesn’t, we energize a theatre of our being that is unfamiliar territory. We engage our personality and we don’t understand the masks others or we wear because they cannot be reduced to mathematical sense.
We have no option, then, with such a mindset but to suspend sensibility and enter the irrational world with the same gusto that we were famously applauded in the rational world. As Captain Nowak’s defense attorney advises, “We have a desperate woman who wants to have a conversation with the other woman,” but unfortunately with weapons she doesn’t possess.
* * * * * *
The selling skills of persuasion are not part of the curriculum of quantitative thinkers, and so they are vulnerable to exploitation. This was the case in the 1970s with Xerox engineers. They pleaded with management to produce the personal computer that they had developed but they didn’t attempt to persuade them with the economic advantage to its production. Again, thinking was reduced to the part and not the whole.
Xerox engineers were too busy with their bleeding hearts and arms across their chests finding contemptible solace in that nobody understood them, as if the matter was all about “them” and not about “it.” This has become the syndrome of our times with highly competent people dying, so to speak, on the vine, losing the advantage of their considerable gifts.
We inject ourselves with our own poison and try to reconcile our sick society to health by ignoring the fact that we do, engaging in the nervous exercise of “why,” when the why is quite apparent.
Many have explored the problem of self beyond the genetic self (essence) and acquired self (personality). R. D. Laing in “The Divided Self” (1965) sees it as a struggle between sanity and insanity; Charles Fair in the “The Dying Self” (1969) sees the instinctive self at war with the conscious self; and Nathaniel Branden in “The Disowned Self” (1972) sees an emotional barrier between thoughts and feelings. This is a sample of inquiries into the dichotomy of self. I have a singular fascination for engineers and scientists.
Perhaps this is so because they defy defining. Take Kary Mullis. The Nobel Laureate for chemistry (1993) is by his own admission a character off the wall, a beach bum, surfer, and not nailed down too tightly. He is a free spirit in an uptight profession. He argues passionately against the commercialization of science in convincing fashion in “Dancing Naked in the Mind Field” (2000).
No doubt thinking of himself, Mullis finds unorthodox but promising ideas fall victim to grantsmanship and marketing, treating their creators as outsiders if not pariahs if they don’t behave as expected. Co-winner of the Nobel Prize (with Michael Smith of Canada), his unconventional approach to genetic chemistry has given us the “DNA fingerprint” that has changed the nature of our society in terms of paternity suits and the guilt or innocence of the accused in the criminal justice system.
Rather than profiting from this discovery, and taking his position of one as the grand new men of science, he has been portrayed as something of a flake. Unfortunately, he has added credibility to this charge with his claim in his book to having been rescued by a beautiful damsel on an astral plane while having an extraterrestrial experience.
There is a madness about our times that has knocked our mental atlas off its axis. While moving towards a world population of seven billion souls and a complexity beyond what anyone a mere fifty years ago could have envisioned, we are left, each of us, with our own individual selves to find the balance necessary to relate meaningfully with each other. We have no other choice. The survival of our planet is at risk.
A LOOK BACK TO LOOK AHEAD is one man’s view derived from his experience, his fondness for books, and ideas of those who have dedicated their lives to our common dilemma, and his desire to share this with his readers. More than a half-century ago, psychiatrist C. B. Chisholm summed it up rather harshly but poignantly:
“It almost always happened that among all the people in the world only our own parents, and perhaps a few people they selected, were right about everything. We could refuse to accept their rightness only at the price of a load of guilt and fear, and perils to our immortal souls. This training has been practically universal in the human race. Variations in content have had almost no importance. The fruit is poisonous no matter how it is prepared or disguised.”
* * * * * *
A VARIATION OF MUNCHAUSEN SYNDROME BY PROXY
“A woman who experts said has a rare mental disorder has been sentenced to more than 15 years in prison after admitting she injected fecal matter into her infant daughter. She liked the attention that her daughter’s sickness generated around her.”
http://www.google.com/, January 31, 2007
We associate this disease, Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, with parents who cause injuries to their children to bring attention to themselves. It is primarily physical harm that is visible and draws immediate attention and sympathy to the parents who must deal with their children’s suffering.
I see a variation of this disease in a wider connection. I see us injecting ourselves with our own venom to draw attention and sympathy to our self-indulgent plight. This is easier than accepting our struggles and wrestling with our limitations to take appropriate action. We have a weakness for theatre. Some might call it a failure to grow up.
CONVERSATION WITH AN AUHTOR FRIEND
Recently, I had occasion to see a writer friend that I hadn’t seen in over a decade. A brilliant engineer with one hundred patents to his name, he has written three compelling books on what he calls “the new plague.” They deal with organization complexity and the failure of organization to make appropriate adjustments to complexity, resulting in debilitating entropy: translation, a “sick society.”
His first words in greeting, “Do you still write angry?”
There is not an appropriate comeback without appearing defensive, so I answered honestly, “If I do, I don’t feel as angry as I did as a young man. I see we’re stuck. I sense this is because we hide behind these charges of being angry or critical or whatever without taking the time to get inside the language to see if there is any substance to these charges.”
“Now you’re sounding like a social scientist. I guess you’ve left your engineering behind.”
“I hope not. But being stuck I see is indisputable. I’ve taken a look back to see ahead using some famous voices of the past to show we haven’t moved from where they saw us.”
“You think this will trigger some action?”
“Our engineering taught us that system failures are not the result of occasional glitches but chronic problems. Our sick culture is our chronic problem.”
“So?”
“So that is my thesis. We keep reinjecting ourselves with the same poisons, and then crying woe is me.”
“Don’t you see your vanity in this? Who are you to cry, ‘wolf’? Nobody cares what Jim Fisher thinks. You might better feed your money to the birds.”
“William,” I said, “if money were my motivation, I wouldn’t be writing what Alan Watts calls, ‘a society burning up rubber going nowhere with its foot to the floor on the brake and accelerator at once’ and Bill Buckley refers to as simply ‘forward inertia.’ You can’t get more stuck than that.”
“So, now you’re a Zen Watts and a cant Buckley.”
“Insofar as they are or were outsiders, yes, but only in that sense. I’m too old to go on the stump with my ideas, but sufficiently conscious to write, so that’s what I do.”
“Yes, I see that.”
With that, we went off into less controversial concerns with a promise to keep in touch.
THE ULTIMATE DIDACTIC
Writers are not only recorders of events but alarmists as well, as they attempt to get our attention one way or another. Over the years, I’ve read thousands of pieces of information, and have gleaned patterns of a consistent theme. You could change the dates and put them on the newsstand tomorrow without anyone knowing the difference, confirming our being stuck:
Psychology Today (August 1969) “The demonics of Post-Freudian man.” Rollo May’s book “Love and Will” is used to point out that we are all part of a schizoid world, but seemingly powerless to do anything about it. This world has never left us.
US News & World Report (September 3, 1979) “New Breed of Workers.” The piece sees this new breed as prosperous, restless and demanding. The only thing that has changed is the software.
Today’s Office (July 1983) “Quality of Work Life: Labor’s Love Found” with a caption of two automobile bumper stickers reading, “I love my employees” and “I love my job.” QWL was the prevalent 1980s human resources theme, which led to complacency rather than contribution in work. Delta Air Lines’ employees gave the company a jumbo jet; today Delta lies in ruin. An adversary view of this I gave at a conference nearly got me fired.
Business Week (July 14, 1986) “Japan In America.” The cover shows an American with a Japanese flag across the brim of his hardhat. The article sounds the alarm that Japanese management is integral to workers. It lays the bombshell that workers work smarter when management pays attention to their ideas. The message was largely ignored. Today (2007) Toyota owns the American automotive industry. It left Chrysler in the dust, bumped Ford aside as if it wasn’t there, and is now climbing up GM’s back as GM staggers forward on bankrupt legs.
International Business Week (November 3, 1986) “Chrysler’s Next Act.” The cover shows CEO Lee Iacocca undraping a new automobile with the caption: “Sure, the company’s big comeback turned Lee Iacocca into a hero. But Chrysler needs a new strategy, and Iacocca has plenty of ideas.” The article supports the myth of the “great man” theory of leadership with the Chrysler sphinx rising from its ashes with Iacocca at the helm. Leadership is a collective conscience dedicated to a consensus purpose, a lesson American industry has not yet learned.
Newsweek (July 4, 1988) “Freud’s Enduring Legacy: How His Ideas Still Shape Psychotherapy.” A series of articles go into how Freud’s teachings still exert influence, how they sustain the theoretical debate, and how such extremists as Jacques Lacan use neo-Freudianism to promote anti-humanism. The Freud focus illustrates the dearth of ideas since then, as little has changed.
Fortune (February 27, 1989) “America’s Toughest Bosses (Frank Lorenzo of Texas Air on the cover): Meet Seven of the Steeliest Taskmasters in Business, and Count Your Blessings.” The article is a hagiography of the great leader myth of fourteen-hour working days, six days a week, implying this is necessary to keep their companies afloat. This myth of leadership rose out of WWII and survives to this day.
Time (August 28, 1995) “20th Century Blues: Stress, anxiety, depression; the new science of evolutionary psychology finds the roots of modern maladies in our genes.” The article uses the word “science” with a casualness that is no longer surprising. It claims, “the problem is that too little of our ‘social’ contact is social in the natural, intimate sense of the word.” Where is it to be found? One must dig for clues like paleontologists into the genes. The piece claims the ultimate in isolation technologies is television. The galloping ghost of cyberspace or cell phone mania was not yet on the radar.
Time (February 19, 1996) “The Golden Geeks.” The cover shows a barefoot Marc Andreessen sitting on a throne in jeans and a polo shirt with the cocky grin of the “instantaire” on his face. The article profiles him along with Steve Jobs, Jeff Braun, Doug Colbeth, and Bill Schrader. They all look happy, full of themselves and on top of the world, as if instant fame and fortune are perfect painkillers to “20th century blues.” But where are most of them now?
Time (September 16, 1996) “Whose Web Will It Be?” The cover is the face of Bill Gates in a spider’s web with his trophies of Apple, IBM, and Netscape. The caption reads: “He conquered the computer world. Now he wants the Internet. If Microsoft overwhelms Netscape, Bill Gates could rule the Information Age.” The article is titled “Winner take all” with a quote from the war guru Karl von Clausewitz: “War belongs to the province of business competition, which is also the conflict of human interests.” IBM was slow out of the blocks with the pc; Microsoft slow out of the gate to cyberspace; Google eclipsed them both. The bunny jump continues with the only question: who is behind door number four?
Time (December 31, 1999) “Person of the Century.” The cover is a full-face picture of Albert Einstein with those knowing sad eyes like a hound dog that sees with sorrow into the new century. What was beautiful about this man, something that is missing now, is that he combined the deep sense of moral wisdom with a total indifference to convention. Einstein was an authentic man in a Teflon age.
The stories don’t change because we are stuck. As stress, anxiety and depression escalate, what do we do? We invent a new science. Today it is evolutionary psychology; tomorrow it will be genetic psychology. There is little interest in discovering the chronic causes of our sickness. It is too depressing; more fun to put our minds and hearts at ease inventing new toys and new sciences.
Find and destroy the offending gene pool and man will be once again able to go forward unimpeded in his quest for happiness. The irony is that we fail to see the sickness in this. It seldom occurs to us that the maze we are in is the maze we have created and therefore only we have the key to the locked door.
These narratives that bounce off our psyches are essentially insiders’ dictums, insiders’ interpretations of the dramas of our times. They see it as their role to protect the status quo by reinjecting us with its cultural malaise, and then as we falter, pointing out how they are the voice of our salvation. They burn the village to save it. They rob our treasurer of its wealth to fight wars they have provoked and which we are to fight. They poison us with fear and then assign themselves as its alleviators, variations of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.
WHO STIRS THE DRINK?
The paradox is that insiders capture our attention while outsiders stir the drink. Outsiders write most of the books with insiders’ names on the jackets. They write the speeches, the strategy briefs, and the tactical maneuvers of the generals, CEOs, politicians, educators, clerics, and television commentators. They remain essentially invisible mesmerized by their nearness to power while, paradoxically, unaware of their own.
This is played out with bizarre finality in the engineering community. The modern world is a product of the engineering mind. Yet while they created this world, it does not belong to them. It has been stolen from them.
Steven Jobs was designing video games for Atari, while his engineering buddy Stephen Wozniak was working on pocket calculators for Hewlett-Packard. Wozniak designed a personal computer but couldn’t get HP to produce and market it. Jobs was touring a Xerox facility in 1979 when, suddenly, his world changed.
The Xerox’s computer graphic screen, overlapping popup windows, icons, fonts, and mouse immediately intrigued him. He found himself leaping and jumping around the room, yelling, “Why aren’t you doing something with this?” The implication was, “If you don’t, I will,” and of course he did.
The Xerox engineers who designed the computer didn’t have the will, way or persuasive skills to convince Xerox management that it was sitting on gold.
In the 1980s, IBM was asleep at the wheel of the pc surge. It lost more than $70 billion of stock valuation and eliminated more than 200,000 jobs. In a panic, it rushed to get into the computer business by putting together existing components and technology instead of launching into complete reengineering. It looked for an operating system and decided on Digital Research whose operating system CP/M was the market leader for personal computers at the time.
But IBM could not come to agreement with the firm’s engineering head. He was out flying his plane. His wife, Dorothy McEwen, who handled the business end, instead met with IBM representatives and rejected its offer as too lopsided to IBM. Her main concern was the “nondisclosure” agreement required by IBM, which would, as she saw it, have allowed IBM to hear about DR’s products, and then go out and duplicate them on its own.
Waiting in the wings was a fledgling company, Microsoft, which had more chutzpah than cutting edge technology. It could not say “yes” fast enough. It looked at the contract as a vehicle that would allow it to sell its real products, the programming languages. So, late in 1980, IBM signed the agreement that would turn Bill Gates, and his partners, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer into multi-billionaires.
To satisfy IBM, Microsoft had to do some stealing, posthaste. It bought the rights to what was then called the “Quick and Dirty Operating System” (QDOS) from the small firm, Seattle Computer. Microsoft first paid $25,000 for non-exclusive rights. SC had no idea how valuable DOS would become.
Microsoft then quickly paid an additional $50,000 for exclusive rights. In 1986, six years later, Microsoft paid Seattle Computer nearly $1 million to settle a dispute over the rights to DOS. Microsoft was now home free and on its way.
This is a common story throughout the history of engineering. It has been finessed and flummoxed by opportunists since the discovery of the wheel. Engineers have shown a lack of moxie and bravado when it has come to selling their ideas. That is due, in part, because they reason from the general to the particular (deduction), whereas marketing types reason from the particular to the general (induction). Engineering is a conforming discipline whereas the rebel defies convention. No surprise, Jobs was a college drop out; Gates was, too. Their strengths were in selling, not inventing or building. And so it has been to the present day.
Several years ago, I wrote “The Lost Soul of the Engineer” (Short-Circuit Spring 1993) in which I observed engineers have a fatal attraction for being exploited. This inclination is derived from their conformist education in which skills are honed out with well-established engineering and mathematical principles that can easily be replicated and therefore are indisputable.
It results in hard wiring to stay and not stray from consistency. While developing their essence to the fullest, their personality is left vulnerable to attack on all sides. They are outsiders in which insiders can exploit them at will, and unfortunately do.
A consistent complaint of engineers is that they are under utilized. It never occurs to them that it is their fault. They expect their value to be self-evident and appreciated.
Engineers are not decisive because they don’t see decision-making as part of their job. They are problem solvers that are easily thrown off stride by turf wars or the politics incidental to perks and salary concerns. Consequently, pay them a dollar more an hour than they can afford to quit and you own them.
Their tentative nature surfaces if found in a position of authority. This finds them looking for more data to verify with a mania for bottom line perfection. It is no accident that major corporations manned by engineers and scientists seldom show the flexibility to deal with sudden disruptive change.
They fall back on what they know, failing to trust their instincts, often putting their behavior on a collision course with the unexpected. Take American transportation. This industry is dominated by CEOs with engineering backgrounds, and is struggling.
As Plato might observe, engineers have the power to see into their own soul, but they must be goaded into looking in the right direction. These technology creators of the modern world have spurned responsibility for its chaos. They have allowed technocrats and entrepreneurs to possess, exploit and manage it. Fault them not as they have come to this advantage by default.
Obviously, not all engineers are outsiders. But the general perception is that they have allowed insiders to run with their ideas polluting society with the wastes of their creation. We see this in automobile exhaust emissions, nuclear waste, pesticides, the weapons of mass destruction, indeed, all the toys and tools of the electronic age. Engineers have taken a subservient role poisoned by passivity, when they should be stirring the drink.
Their contempt for things non-engineering has put them in a cage of their own making, and society with them. Society is sick because it is out-of-control. It is out-of-control because the designers and builders of the modern world are waiting for someone else to demonstrate moral authority. It has become the age of science sublimated to technology with scientists and engineers acting like children, and we with them, passively consuming our own waste.
This plays out in a bizarre way. We applaud scientists and engineers for their temporary cures of diseases that are man made. These diseases then metastasize to new illnesses as we fail to accept the connection of social behavior with our chronic prone culture. On the surface, it appears we are playing catch up, but in fact we are only running faster in place.
A BRIDGE TOO FAR – A CASE IN POINT
The distressing nature of this futile war was never made more apparent than when I was invited to the Charles Stark Draper Laboratories (CSDL) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts to work with their scientists and engineers.
At the time, I was an organizational development (OD) psychologist at Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida. The director of CSDL had read an article of mine reprinted from a paper given at the National Conference of the Institute of Printed Circuits (Dallas, Texas October 1981). He invited me to spend a couple weeks with his people whom he believed could benefit from such exposure.
The mind is a strange playground. It is only amenable to information presented that is consistent with information already there. If information cannot pass through that filter and make connection with that knowledge base, it is rejected. Leon Festinger had much to say about that with his cognitive dissonance theory.
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD has endeavored to show how social philosophers have attempted to penetrate this barrier with reason. In that rendering, they found no need to push the envelope to restructure the predominant mental mindset of the time, satisfied to turn that over to others to solve. That was then; this is now.
Engineers and scientists have created an educated constituency, and an educated workforce programmed within the limits of linear logic and cognitive comprehension but ill prepared to deal with a sick, topsy-turvy irrational world where chaos has trumped order, and reason has taken a holiday.
They have created the modern world, made the inventions, discovered DNA, created the Internet, and other remarkable innovations, only to be pushed aside by the opportunists to exploit this chaos with irrational glee. This has left these programmed rationalists behind, traumatized and confounded by the out-of-control world they have spawned. That was apparent in 1983 with my visit to MIT, a citadel of rationalists, who lived by the purity of algorithms. They became quickly unglued when I challenged them to think differently about common problems of behavior, mainly their own.
Before I share that visit with you, I should mention that my boss, the late Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth, cautioned the director that he should know, up front, that my style was unconventional, and to be patient as the chaos I created would ultimately settle into a surprising order. Then privately, he said to me, “Don’t piss them off, hear me?”
“Well, maybe I shouldn’t go,” I said.
“No, no,” he replied, “I’ve already warned the director you’re a guy in their face, and he said, ‘good, they need that.’” I hoped he meant it.
* * * * * *
Here I was, a tall blue-eyed blond Irishman from the Midwest, with a land grant state institutional education, finding myself among the country’s engineering and scientific elite.
When I entered the conference room, I saw the tables had been arranged in a “U” shaped pattern with twenty-six bored faces looking up at me. The director introduces me stating that I would be working with them for the next few weeks. A groan greeted the news. To my chagrin, nothing was said about my role. With that, the director went to the back of the room, folded his arms across his chest, and waited for me to take over.
“Good morning,” I said with a forced smile.
“What’s good about it?” somebody said. “I’ve got work to do. What am I doing here?”
“Why do you think you’re here?” I countered.
“Oh, you’re going to play that game with us, huh?”
I didn’t answer.
“Well, I suppose you’re here because my boss wants you here.” He looked to the back of the room.
“No,” I answered, “I don’t think that would be accurate.”
He looked at his colleagues, and said, “Here that?” And then with a smug attempt to mock my voice, he added, “He doesn’t think that’s accurate.” This was greeted with laughter. When the laughter subsided, he continued, “He wants me to ask what he means by accurate.”
I smiled, and said, “That would help.”
Another guy chirped, “I don’t want to be disrespectful, Dr. Fisher, but I’m a little pissed off bringing somebody from the outside to tell us what we should and shouldn’t do. What I’d like to know is who brought you here?”
Again, I didn’t say anything.
Somebody else chimed in, “Why don’t you answer the man?”
“Why don’t you answer him?” I said.
“He asked you, not me.”
“True, the question was directed at me but it was all about you, all of you. You brought me here.”
They sat there combatively, but without another word.
“Yes,” I continued, “it’s about all of you. I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t here, and you wouldn’t be here,” pointing to the whole assembly, “unless there was a reason for me to be here.”
“Oh, he’s going to go Aristotelian on us.”
Again, I said nothing.
“Okay,” somebody said, “we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. You tell us what this is all about.”
“It is just what I said. You brought me here. It is all about you.”
“I didn’t bring you here,” some female chimed in for the first time.
I smiled again, and said, “Oh, but miss, you did. And so did you and you and you,” and as I said this my finger pointing at each of them about the room as my voice rose to a crescendo. Quite remarkably, all of a sudden they were sitting back on their seats with their arms folded across their chests.
Very quickly, with that little dramatization, they went from the offense to the defense. They looked like the obedient little boys and girls that they were programmed to be underneath the façade of combativeness.
More consoling, I continued, “Let me ask you a question. How many of you in this room have been to Clearwater, Florida?” One hand went up, the director’s. “Let me ask you another question, how would you on a scale of ten describe the design of your ring laser gyro that is being built in Clearwater?”
“Fifteen,” somebody said.
“Come on now, honestly, on a scale of one to ten where do you see your design.”
“Ten plus,” somebody answered.
“Okay, I’ll accept that. How many of you agree?” All hands went up. “You take pride in the excellence of your design.” They nodded. “Now here is another question, if this is such a perfected design, why is it failing to be built to specifications and on schedule, but instead requires extensive rework producing tons of scrap with the US Navy unhappy with CSDL as well as Clearwater?”
“Stands to reason, doesn’t it, that’s because you’ve got numbskulls building it down there.” Laughter.
Somebody else yelled, “You’ve got it!”
Again, I stood there silently.
“Don’t you agree?” my initial questioner asked.
I answered, “I don’t have the foggiest notion. You see, I don’t have the expertise to agree or disagree. And by the way, how do you know they are numbskulls if you’ve never observed their work. That doesn’t sound very scientific to me.” Nobody replied.
At this point, I handed out a book I had put together for this purpose including articles I had previously written, which was titled “Teaming: Productivity Through Cooperation.” I copyrighted it, which caused me some embarrassment later as Honeywell pointed out that it owned my work, all of it, by my initial employment agreement. Technical publications at Honeywell, however, had delighted in putting this book together, and had gone out of their way to make it an attractive document.
“Read this, and I’ll see you tomorrow,” and with that I turned and left the room. They sat there somewhat stunned as the afternoon was dedicated to this purpose and we had been together for only a little over an hour.
When I talked to the director later that day, he said, “You were a little tough on them weren’t you?”
“Not nearly as tough as they are on themselves. Watch what happens tomorrow.”
* * * * * *
The morning came, everyone was there bright and early, and like the eager beavers they are, they were all at full attention for Dr. Fisher from Clearwater, Florida anxious to learn why he was there. He had passed the initial test, now this was his second.
Without preamble, I began, “Your design of these ring gyro systems that are being built one thousand miles away has proven to be a bridge too far.”
They all leaned forward on their chairs mulling over that statement, but said nothing. “It has become apparent that for whatever reason the systems designed cannot be built as designed. There is a fundamental flaw to this thousand-mile gap. Now, yesterday I mentioned this and you were certain it was not your problem, but theirs. I don’t sense that same confidence today.”
Again, no one said a word but literally sat on their hands, not across their chests as they had ended the previous day. Finally, I asked, “What do you make of that, and what can we do about it?”
One of the interesting phenomena of people used to taking orders, when given an opportunity to create the orders to be taken, there is a mismatch between the information in their heads and how to conceptualize it into an action plan. This is because they are trained tacticians and not strategists. They are programmed to think hierarchically and not laterally, to react to orders rather than create action plans irrespective of the orders given, to see only their role in the part and not the whole. Their apparent compliance was not compliance at all, but a reflection of being in unfamiliar territory.
Engineers and scientists have had the rebel carved out of their personality quite early by a rationally dominated objective quantitative education. The mask of conformity has replaced the rebel. It is therefore difficult for them to think qualitatively and subjectively without guilt. I was now in nowhere land in the minefield of nowhere man where vulnerability is at its highest, which behooved me to go gently and prudently forward.
Then somebody said, “Maybe it is simply a matter of competence down there. You know, we don’t even know if there are engineers working on our designs.”
“You may very well have a point. But how do you know that for sure?”
“Well, it stands to reason, if they can’t built it what other explanation can there be?”
“What other reason can you think of?”
Silence.
“It is clear they have a problem. But we can beat our heads against the wall forever, and still not solve it, right?” Another voice offered. More nods of agreement.
What may seem obvious to the reader was not obvious to this elite assembly. Role demands and self-demands were perceived in specific and structured terms of the part, and not the whole. I was leading them to the water but they refused to drink.
“Wrong!” I said.
“Wrong?” Their voices rose in unison.
“Yes, wrong, because we have a problem. I’ve talked to them in Clearwater, and they say, ‘We don’t have a problem, they have a problem,’ meaning you, all of you sitting here have a problem.”
“WE have a problem? That’s beautiful, that’s a good one.”
“YOU have a problem because if you cannot design something that can be replicated and built then YOU have failed, and it should give you little satisfaction that Clearwater has failed with YOU.”
Somebody said, “I don’t have to take this. I’m going.”
I said, “Goodbye!” He didn’t get up. I looked over this engineer’s head at the director and he looked as if he were bleeding to death. I’m sure he was wondering what he had let himself in for. My boss had told him, “Fisher doesn’t use a typical approach. He screws with your head, but in the end he screws it on pretty good. So just let him do his thing and let it go as it does.” The director was doing just that.
“So, you’re going to tell us what the problem is.”
“No, I’m going to ask another question.”
Somebody interrupted, “I told you he was a shrink. He answers a question with a question; our bosses think we’re nuts.” Everybody laughed.
I just smiled. “Yesterday I asked how many of you had spent any time in Clearwater and none of you had. So, none of you know what the difficulties are with building your designs, other than through memos, as none of you know your counterparts as persons in the flesh. What’s more, you have little conception of how the build process is set up there other than in slide presentations. Getting to know the people, coming to understand the production problems, the glitches in the build process can only be understood if you are down there, and not up here. You’re all essentially virgins to that reality.”
“Maybe twenty-five,” somebody said. Everyone laughed.
They started to relax. When you can laugh with yourself rather than at yourself, you have made a turn to possible communication with others.
“Okay,” I said, “then that is one of the problems, getting you face-to-face with your counterparts. That is being arranged for most if not all of you by bringing some people from Clearwater up and sending some of you down, and then establishing a monthly roundtable of personnel from both places to define specific concerns of the moment.”
“And the other problem?”
I smiled. “That is why I’m here. How many have read my book?” All hands were raised.
“My wife’s a psychologist,” one person offered, “the stuff on Freudian psychology she’d never seen explained more plainly.”
“Glad to hear that,” I answered.
“She said listen to this guy. I think he can be useful.”
“We’ll see about that,” I answered.
Someone yelled, “Yeah, we’ll see about that!”
“Well, we’re going to start this afternoon doing that by discussing the framework of will.” Groans. “Now, this is not going to be heavy. To get you into the frame of each session, we’ll start with an abstract idea to build to mutual self-understanding. Then, we’ll move quickly into the concrete business of creating useful tools for that purpose.
“We will spend about an hour a session on each of the nine topics covered.” I opened the book to the table of contents. “After the framework of will, we’ll move on to team building, then working relationships in a team, choosing a leadership style, and so on.
“We will break up into three teams. Since we have only 26 participants, I will rotate replacing the ninth member of the team. You’ll each also rotate the team leader.
“Starting tomorrow, after the initial discussion, one of the teams will assemble in the middle of the room to conduct a team meeting with the rest of us as observers. The team will create a meeting objective and agenda on any subject of interest. We will comment on how successful group participation and joint problem solving was facilitated. Each of you will eventually be a team leader with the goal to move the meeting along to its objective without getting anyone mad or causing them to leave.”
Laughter, and then someone added, “Easy for you to say.”
I continued, “We will be looking for polite exchange rather than violent confrontation. Our culture finds us complaining infrequently but violently rather than frequently and politely. We will try to reverse that tendency here. Moreover, we are not promoting harmony, but for people to express their will, and for others to listen respectfully, and feedback honestly what they have heard for clarification and understanding. We will deal with our suspicions and address our concerns in the interest to communicate, which then leads naturally to cooperation. That is our objective.”
They were then instructed to create their teams and spend the balance of the session on organizing their team presentations.
* * * * * *
Team meetings were for thirty minutes or so, followed by a fifteen-minute critique of the meeting by the observers. After a fifteen-minute break, we moved on to the next presentation. This became the format for the next two weeks. Meetings were held from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. This allowed participants time to return to their workstations, offices and labs to handle pressing matters. It also allowed me time to schedule meetings with each of the twenty-six for a one-on-one, interviewing some of them more than once at their request.
Each day was electrifying as they clearly found enjoyment in escaping their normal routines to discover social competence that appeared a surprise to them. You never saw twenty-six adults more animated in this contrived setting. It was clearly fun as well as eye opening. I thought they would see it too much like school, but that never happened. They were too involved in the process.
At the end of these breakout group meetings, each person was given an opportunity with the final full assembly to express what they had derived from the experience. Their candor can be summed up in one word: authentic. No one felt a need to play cute.
* * * * * *
My final meeting was with the director. His first comment: They really liked you.”
“They like me now,” I said, “Because this has all been fun and new. You have problems here. It is not only the way you operate but the way you are designed to operate.”
“You’re talking about Clearwater and a bridge too far, right?” recalling that expression.
“I’m talking about these twin towers and the bridge between them; that is also a bridge too far. People don’t have an office or lab next door, but around the bend.”
“And that is a problem?”
“It seems to be.” Then I told him of the physicist around the bend from the biochemist who hadn’t spoken to each other in twenty years. Secretaries handle exchanges. I noted elitism was rampant, suggesting it was facilitated by the design of the buildings. I ended with, “You are not ergonomically structured to integration here much less with Clearwater.”
His arms were folded tightly across his chest but he said nothing.
“What do you think they hold in common?”
“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”
“They don’t like each other very much. They break out into functional disciplines. This is broken down further into levels of competence and incompetence within and between disciplines, a pettiness supreme. They expended amazing amounts of energy apprising me of this fact. I asked one why he felt that way, and said nobody understood him or his discipline. Another wondered if other disciplines were even science.
“I found this same attitude across all disciplines. Here some technicians have master’s degrees while nearly everyone else has one or more Ph.D. degrees, yet none would seem to have a firm hold on their emotions.”
“It’s a tough intellectual community.”
“It’s a community out of balance, sir,” and before he could comment, “with a strong ego and weak affect. They’ve developed their talents at the expense of their personalities, failing to see that both work best when in balance.”
“Godamn it Fisher, what’s your point?”
“What does tough intellectual community mean to you?”
“That they are very competent, know their jobs.”
“Yes, I’m sure that is true, but ‘tough intellectual community’ is meaningless psychobabble. It doesn’t move the pointer across the page.”
“I’m starting to see your point. It is not enough to be competent and know your job if you can’t work together.”
“Exactly! They think to work well together they must like each other. Not necessary. Accept what each other brings to the party, yes, and respect each other for it, but they don’t have to like each other. Teamwork is not marriage; it is seeing clearly the common objective and pursuing it with due diligence.”
“I can see that.”
“They must be confrontational. That is not natural to them. They thought they could put me quickly on a plane back to Clearwater when they started sending barbs over my bow, but that was precisely what I needed to get this thing off the ground. You said they liked me. As you can see from what I’ve said, liking me is not relevant. More relevant, did I seed the change process?”
“Do you think you did?”
“Not if this is the end. This is the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end, whatever way you want to see it, but it is up to them now, and you.”
“But you’re an outsider. How can I get an insider to follow up with where you’ve left off?”
I laughed.
“What’s so funny?"
“I started out in research and development as a chemist. They saw me as an HR type with a Ph.D. in psychology. They didn’t sense I had been a practicing chemical engineer in the field as well as a chemist in the laboratory. I know the smell of them. Not one of them picked up my odor. They hide behind their knowledge and are protected from social confusion by staying safely in their sanctuary. I would suggest you acquire an OD consultant to untangle this web of denial and deceit.”
* * * * * *
Then I told the director a story of the false positive of the purity of design. A former employer of mine had developed a process for making tetraethyl and tetra methyl lead as catalysts for refining crude oil. It was a fraction of the cost of the established German Grignard Process. Customers were lined up across the world. A factory was built in Freeport, Texas largely with borrowed money. Unfortunately, the process was too pure and the factory blew up from spontaneous combustion.
It was the 1960s. The company was undergoing unprecedented growth. This accident stopped it in its tracks. Purity was never considered a problem. But purity was a contingency that had to be addressed and the process adjusted. “If CSDL can adjust its design to fit Clearwater’s restrictions,” I said, “you will reduce that thousand miles to being essentially face-to-face.” And it happened. Some balance was restored in Cambridge, while Clearwater successfully commenced to build their designs
THE MIND OF THE TIME IS OFF ITS AXIS
A variation of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy is obviously uncomfortable for readers to consider because it is a reprehensible disease in which harm is done to one to create the advantage of attention for another. What could be more reprehensible than injecting fetal material into the vulnerable? I see cheating, lying, conning, stealing, and bearing false witness against others as reprehensible if not equally so, and much more common.
When our essence is developed and our personality injected with its own venom, or visa versa, it makes for a sickness of the soul of the most debilitating kind.
At a time when the world spins on the engineering mind, it is spinning out of control and off its axis. The evidence is that engineers and scientists create out of their essence and then are finessed by high-testosterone A type personalities. These enterprising characters convince them that they have no business sense; that they need them to show them the way. They blindside these highly trained people in their $7,000 suits by Armani or Prada or Brioni or Kiton while giving the impression that “engineers reign supreme.”
Engineers are then prodded and pushed to impossible schedules to produce the next great electronic toy for the masses in a “culture of innovation.” Tracy Kidder captured this perfectly in “The Soul of Machine” (1981), in which an engineering team worked maddening hours, sometimes 24-hour marathon sessions, to produce a cutting-edge minicomputer only to be dismantled and shredded once the objective was accomplished.
You ask yourself why would such brilliant people allow this to happen? The same answer comes to mind as to why people allowed the Holocaust, global warming, terrorism, or the national debt to soar.
“When people are confronted with an overwhelming threat and don’t see a solution,” writes Ross Gelbspan (The Heat is On 1998), “it makes them feel impotent. So they shrug it off or go into deliberate denial.”
Even Kidder was ambivalent about these engineers seeing them as “heroes,” and their efforts as “heroic.” It would seem, however, they have more in common than we would like with Frederick Winslow Taylor’s description of steelworkers nearly a century ago in “Scientific Management” (1911):
“One of the very first requirements for man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles an ox than any other type.”
Joseph Finder in “Paranoia” (2004) novelizes how a software engineer is blackmailed into spying on a competitor. It is war of another kind with the wheelers and dealers having no compunction to promote technology for their rapacious gain using the poison of terror and intimidation of the best and the brightest to satisfy their ends.
Dropouts rule this world of the electronics of cyberspace. Either wearing khakis, polo shirts and sandals or Armani suits look past the disguises, and you see the nervous energy, ganglions over-caffeinated and the fast talk to suggest quick minds. Whatever the education, high tech people like to talk like engineers, going naturally into acronyms and engineering jargon.
Once engineers feel in safe territory they’ll do their bidding. And who are these new “robber barons”? They are secular popes with an ecclesiastical curia, and clerical hierarchy of ubiquitous promoters, endorsers and enforcers who have an umbilicus connection to their passionate parishioner buyers worldwide.
No one questions the wisdom of the Information Age or its electronic dogma because it pervades the universe as the new religion with the certainty that once was only that of the Roman Catholic Church of the Middle Ages.
The common denominator of this reality is that although engineers design the wonders of the world they seldom control, much less profit from them. This is not a recent situation. Thomas Edison, who is revered in our society, was not an engineer but self-educated, and a compulsive stealer of other people’s ideas. No one knew this better than Nikola Tesla, one of the greatest inventors the world has ever known. Called a madman by some, a genius by others, and an enigma by nearly everyone, he was certainly one of the strangest of scientists. Margaret Cheney captures this in “Tesla: Man Out of Time” (1981). He introduced the fundamentals to robotry, computers, and missile science, and helped pave the way for such space-age technologies as satellites, microwaves, beam weapons, and nuclear fusion. Yet, even with his considerable contributions he remains practically unknown as compared to his adversary, Edison. Edison attempted to sabotage his discovery of alternating current (A/C) by electrocuting elephants with it to show its harmful effects, when A/C was actually much safer than D/C.
* * * * * *
There is an arrogance to essence that doesn’t see a need for comparable attention to personality. Seldom will you find an engineer, for example, who will admit to reading fiction, which is actually a laboratory of the heart, and the heart gets us in a lot more trouble than the head ever has.
Take the case of the Astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak. The 43-year-old Naval Academy graduate and married mother of three managed a demanding career, motherhood and the military, only to come crashing down to the reality that the mind has a heart. She is currently the source of late night television jokes and newspaper editorial cartoons. It is the way we handle our societal sickness: by fogging it up with misdirection.
Little attention is paid to the remarkable accomplishment of this young lady. She passed through the brutal 50-year-old Darwinian screening process of NASA, to be a shuttle flight veteran and brilliant engineer. Her problem is that she suffered a painful divorce and fell in love with another Astronaut, divorced Captain William Oefelein, 41, whose current girlfriend was stationed 900-miles from Houston in Orlando.
Mrs. Nowak rushed across this distance wearing space diapers so that she wouldn’t have to have pit stops along the way. Then in a bizarre fashion she threatened Air Force Captain Colleen Shipman, single and 30, allegedly with murder on her mind.
As we have discussed, a scientific and engineering education is highly programmed to deterministic solutions. One of the beauties of such an education and its exercise is that it is essentially clean of emotionalism. We can develop our essence, our genetic gifts for quantitative thinking unencumbered with the messiness and aberrancy of personality.
Our passion for science and mathematics is almost religious because we are in control. We don’t have to deal with the spuriousness of the soft sciences. What we formulate in Clinton, Iowa can be replicated in Hong Kong. What the formula tells us today will not vary with the weather or any elemental change tomorrow, at least not mathematically, as the algorithms are truth personified.
It is a heady thing to exercise such control, a place for everything and everything in its place, and have the certainty of not only control but also that there is common agreement with our findings. There is consensus without any emotional wrangling with suspicion or disagreement or criticism. The facts speak for themselves.
Unfortunately, we have a tendency, those of us schooled in the sciences, to expect life to fall at our feet with the same consistency. When it doesn’t, we energize a theatre of our being that is unfamiliar territory. We engage our personality and we don’t understand the masks others or we wear because they cannot be reduced to mathematical sense.
We have no option, then, with such a mindset but to suspend sensibility and enter the irrational world with the same gusto that we were famously applauded in the rational world. As Captain Nowak’s defense attorney advises, “We have a desperate woman who wants to have a conversation with the other woman,” but unfortunately with weapons she doesn’t possess.
* * * * * *
The selling skills of persuasion are not part of the curriculum of quantitative thinkers, and so they are vulnerable to exploitation. This was the case in the 1970s with Xerox engineers. They pleaded with management to produce the personal computer that they had developed but they didn’t attempt to persuade them with the economic advantage to its production. Again, thinking was reduced to the part and not the whole.
Xerox engineers were too busy with their bleeding hearts and arms across their chests finding contemptible solace in that nobody understood them, as if the matter was all about “them” and not about “it.” This has become the syndrome of our times with highly competent people dying, so to speak, on the vine, losing the advantage of their considerable gifts.
We inject ourselves with our own poison and try to reconcile our sick society to health by ignoring the fact that we do, engaging in the nervous exercise of “why,” when the why is quite apparent.
Many have explored the problem of self beyond the genetic self (essence) and acquired self (personality). R. D. Laing in “The Divided Self” (1965) sees it as a struggle between sanity and insanity; Charles Fair in the “The Dying Self” (1969) sees the instinctive self at war with the conscious self; and Nathaniel Branden in “The Disowned Self” (1972) sees an emotional barrier between thoughts and feelings. This is a sample of inquiries into the dichotomy of self. I have a singular fascination for engineers and scientists.
Perhaps this is so because they defy defining. Take Kary Mullis. The Nobel Laureate for chemistry (1993) is by his own admission a character off the wall, a beach bum, surfer, and not nailed down too tightly. He is a free spirit in an uptight profession. He argues passionately against the commercialization of science in convincing fashion in “Dancing Naked in the Mind Field” (2000).
No doubt thinking of himself, Mullis finds unorthodox but promising ideas fall victim to grantsmanship and marketing, treating their creators as outsiders if not pariahs if they don’t behave as expected. Co-winner of the Nobel Prize (with Michael Smith of Canada), his unconventional approach to genetic chemistry has given us the “DNA fingerprint” that has changed the nature of our society in terms of paternity suits and the guilt or innocence of the accused in the criminal justice system.
Rather than profiting from this discovery, and taking his position of one as the grand new men of science, he has been portrayed as something of a flake. Unfortunately, he has added credibility to this charge with his claim in his book to having been rescued by a beautiful damsel on an astral plane while having an extraterrestrial experience.
There is a madness about our times that has knocked our mental atlas off its axis. While moving towards a world population of seven billion souls and a complexity beyond what anyone a mere fifty years ago could have envisioned, we are left, each of us, with our own individual selves to find the balance necessary to relate meaningfully with each other. We have no other choice. The survival of our planet is at risk.
A LOOK BACK TO LOOK AHEAD is one man’s view derived from his experience, his fondness for books, and ideas of those who have dedicated their lives to our common dilemma, and his desire to share this with his readers. More than a half-century ago, psychiatrist C. B. Chisholm summed it up rather harshly but poignantly:
“It almost always happened that among all the people in the world only our own parents, and perhaps a few people they selected, were right about everything. We could refuse to accept their rightness only at the price of a load of guilt and fear, and perils to our immortal souls. This training has been practically universal in the human race. Variations in content have had almost no importance. The fruit is poisonous no matter how it is prepared or disguised.”
* * * * * *
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