OUR CLICHE CULTURE COMES HOME TO ROOST

OUR CLICHÉ CULTURE COMES HOME TO ROOST

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 2007

“Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy when great ones are not in the way. For want of a block he will stumble at a straw.”

Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), Irish satirist

THE MISCHIEF OF METAPHOR

We see people “looking at the glass half full or half empty” as a convenient way to identify their disposition, but what does the expression mean? What does it tell us, if anything?

It is an expression outside of us provoking no action but suggestion an inside preference.

Likewise, our inclination is meaningless if we judge the situation outside its context. There are times when optimism is healthy and times when it is sick, as there are times when pessimism is healthy and times when it is sick.

A situation is never an either/or proposition. Take self-esteem. Books, videos, and a constant barrage of television gurus promote formulas for self-esteem. But you cannot wish yourself esteemed. You must earn it. You earn it by fighting through low esteem. And you do this by getting unstuck.

In point of fact, it is dangerous to view every situation as optimistic when clearly there are good reasons to see some situations in pessimistic terms. We need the dark clouds that promise rain as much as we need the cloudless skies that guarantee sunshine. It is as unnatural to be always “up” as it is to be always “down.” Life has a rhythm to it and we are designed to be resilient, not rigid. When we claim to always be on top of everything, it suggests we are stuck. There is an old popular song about “laughing on the outside and crying on the inside” that is closer to the mark.

What determines whether we are stuck or not is a matter of how we look at and define the situations we experience. Stuckness is the rigidity of a mind that will resist seeing the situation and circumstances for what they are.

This is not a matter of talent or genius or the generosity of circumstances. It is simply a preference for seeing conditions, as they should be not as they are. When we are rigidly judgmental, we are either stuck in optimism or pessimism, which are equally damaging.

Stated another way, when we stop growing, we don’t vegetate. We start to die. There are people in their teens embracing the dying process, which they call “boredom,” whereas there are people in their seventies and eighties that are still growing.

Sometimes, the metamorphic glass is indeed half full and other times it is half empty. So, to suggest it is half full when it is half empty is to stumble over it as if it were a metaphoric straw.

It was in reflecting on this as I had a coffee at McDonald’s today waiting for my Beautiful Betty to join me to select luggage for our European trip. My mind turned to wondering why we always seem to look at problems from the outside or the same perspective. We do it so repeatedly that two puzzlers came to mind while trying to think over the cell phone chatter that surrounded me.

THE CLICHÉ OF LEADERSHIP

Having just left Barnes & Noble, after inspecting new books on leadership, including a new one by Lee Iacocca and several by John Maxwell, the leadership guru, as well as others of note, I could not help but notice these books were all about the leader and not one of them about the led. They were no less leadership prescriptions than books that came out of post-World War II from such authors as Douglas McGregor, or Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, in other words, indicators of our stuckness in leadership style.

Maxwell has a fetish about the “leader within” while Iaccoca addresses the problem of leadership as if he is the Supreme Pontiff of ecclesiastical leadership. Iacocca does not appear a bit self-conscious in issuing dogmatic encyclicals from his exalted throne, whereas Maxwell sounds like a retread of a priest of the 1970s who was then harping about the “child within.” The good priest never thought it an incongruity to bypass that elusive “adult within” in his quest for personal validation.

Should the reader be able to clone himself into Iacocca or to discover the leader within of Maxwell, the problem of leadership would still remain unresolved because it is the wrong focus.

When only ten percent of the workforce was well educated, and workers obediently marched to the beat of their masters, workers could be duped into such cadence. Not anymore.

Ninety percent of the workforce now is as privy to everything as is its management, plus better educated than most managers who would claim to be their leaders. Therefore, it behooves leaders today to recognize that leadership is all about the led, and not about the leader. This is true of students, parishioners, the military, buyers and the voting constituency.

The focus of leadership should be on the led, and what the leader can glean from that focus to make the led all that they could be.

This is not epiphany stuff.

Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century could already see that there was a disconnect between the ruling class and his people. He wandered among them incognito to get a sense of this, and to assess the trust level of his leadership. He needed this to gauge a momentous disruption of stuckness in feudalism. He could see the handwriting on the wall. Russia was a crumbling feudal empire and the West was leaving Russia in its dust. He knew leadership was not all about him but all about the people. His pressing problem was how to use this understanding to pitchfork his people into the changing modern world. Once he got a sense of his people, he embarked on a series of sweeping military, fiscal, administrative, educational, cultural and ecclesiastical reforms, many of them based on Western European models. All classes of Russian society suffered from the impact of these reforms, including his own son who died leading a conspiracy against his father. Becoming unstuck exacts a price. No platitudes are going to engineer a necessary process to completion. This can only be accomplished by embracing our natural resistance to change.

THE CLICHÉ OF POVERTY

There was a great economic depression in the late nineteenth century, but even a greater one in the early second quarter of the twentieth century. The Great Depression of the twentieth century put the focus of capitalistic democracies on the elimination of material poverty.

The United States came to stir the world’s drink as Europe was decimated by the destruction of World War II, while the United States was left intact with its industrial and management might operating at full steam unimpeded by such devastation.

A new mentality rose out of this conflagration. Economic Man with the mindset of progress was now committed to obliterate material poverty. To a considerable degree it was successful in the United States as many who had been poor for generations came to capture something of the “American Dream” in wealth and relative luxury. A vibrant middle class seemed to have been created, but was it so vibrant?

Americans, it would seem, have never associated luxury with rest but instead with the pursuit of more. This has translated into new activities; new acquisitions and symbols of new status with “bigger and better” becoming the new mantra.

For more than a half century, this has been going on with many new problems, problems that never existed when material poverty was a lifelong status. Ironically, we were a happier and more integrated society when we were poor. Wealth has made us poorer in spirit as a function of our material prosperity.

Similarly, the functional family has been replaced by the dysfunctional family; the active individual has been replaced by the obese couch potato; the comfortable stability of regional heritage has been replaced by everyone and every place looking the same; while the center of life which once rotated around the axis of family, church and school has been replaced by a potpourri of distracting activities that are centrifugal rather than centripetal.

The most egregious sin in America is for an activity to be an end in itself, such as reading a book, pruning roses, or going to school. Everything must have instrumental and terminal coordinates or the activity is judged a waste of time. We are an action-oriented society even if we delude ourselves with passive participation.

Consequently, one size does seem to fit all as the richest and poorest in quest of eradicating material poverty are as likely as not to be involved in crime, violence, illegitimacy, drug addiction, divorce, obesity, AIDs, homicide, suicide, corruption, and every other expression of spiritual poverty.

Spiritual poverty has been ignored as if the magnitude of material abundance and prosperity would be sufficient to eliminate it from the face of the earth. We make a big deal about philanthropy when it would not be necessary if our values were a little more in balance.

For instance, the welfare system treats those that use it as second-class citizens. Some gravitate towards it because of need, others because it is easy. The irony is that it is a sin to be materially poor, but being spiritually wanting doesn’t seem to get much attention; yet the evidence suggests that as a society we are.

When all the energy and focus has been put on progress, there is little energy left for spiritual poverty. The charge could be made that the welfare system has kept more people in place (and down), or spiritually impoverished and dependent than any other factor.

No one feels good about getting something for nothing. We feel good about ourselves when we are respected for our contributions.

When we either have too little or too much, society suffers a spiritual breakdown.

We see this as good paying jobs are sent abroad. We see this as young people drop out of school. We see this in the failure of young people to be trained in skills to qualify them for well paying jobs. We see this in young girls reaching puberty too early, and having children while still being children. We see this in adults in trusted positions in the home, school, church, workplace, government and military abusing their positions and compromising or corrupting those around them by their actions. Scandal has become so normal as to suggest the normalcy of pathology.

The evidence is overwhelming: the rich and poor of this nation are equally spiritually impoverished.

Spiritual poverty has been beyond the pale of society-at-large to do anything about it. We have created a society where no one is in charge, where boundaries are meaningless or nonexistent, where continence is considered repressive, and self-control oppressive; where freedom is considered doing whatever one pleases when that is the greatest enslavement.

Leaders are looking for a formula on how to be successful instead of learning how to lead the led, while people chase the buck thinking that wealth is the palliative to all their spiritual and material poverty.

Such stuckness is another reason why I wrote A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.

PREORDER INFORMATION: checks in the amount of $30 (plus $5 S&H) for A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD to Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504.