LEADERSHIP REDUX -- JULY 2007
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Where is a leader when you want one?”
“He is at your mind’s door waiting to be invited in.”
I was eating my lunch today and tuned into PBS's Charlie Rose show. He was interviewing some young man who is an "expert" on leadership. I didn't get his name because I didn't stay with the program long.
Rose asked him what constituted a great executive and he spieled off something about a CEO that walked through his shop with a pad and pencil taking down observations and comments.
I lived through that phase. I also lived through the phase where the CEO would have a worldwide television hookup, and "talk to the troops" in the manner of a pontiff with well rehearsed remarks and many smiles.
I lived through off sights and training seminars where "experts" and HR professionals would take a group through this or that fad-of-the-moment. One of the longest such engagements was Quality Control Circles, which was a good idea, but for the wrong audience and the wrong time with very mixed results.
If it were the 1945-1955 period, it would have been a colossal idea, but it was launched in the 1980s when the workforce had changed the color of its color from blue to white, and 80 to 90 percent of a company’s employees were in the process of getting a higher education degree or already degreed, often in technical fields.
This, mind you, was before the computer took over and the personal became even more impersonal.
It isn't only people like Dan Brown who have successfully chased myths and made bundles for the trouble. Brown is famous for the de Vinci Code, but Tom Peters is equally famous for "a search for excellence" fame. Most of the companies he profiled, however, have crashed and burned or have been absorbed by hedge funds, split up and sold for huge profits. No leadership in this equation.
Leadership cannot be found in what a CEO did or didn't do, nor can excellence be searched for like a pony in a haystack.
Leadership has always been about people, not persons; and excellence is something you create, not something you search for.
You only have to look at the mess the federal government has made in attempting to manage the unmanageable with the broad umbrella of "Homeland Security," or the military trying to solve ancient political and tribal problems with military might, alone. Indeed, when you think things can't get worse, they do.
So, what is the answer?
The answer has been staring us in the face forever.
People are the key, not markets, not global economies, but people.
People are the leaders of what they do. They need the training, support, trust, consistency in policy and fairness in promotion and discipline to make them feel in charge of their work and therefore in charge of and responsible for the results.
Well, you’ve heard all that before so tell me something new?
The new is that people are the key, and this is simply an introduction to what lies behind that door. But before we turn the lock, we need to examine some detritus.
It all went haywire when children were all awarded is school and play equally for unequal performance. Fairness is a brutal concept.
When I was a freshman in college, there were about 3,000 of us. A little more than a third of those that started with me graduated with me. Many flunked out. In those days, students couldn't take the course over to change their grade. They had to live with their failure, and move on.
Today hardly anyone fails at anything and therefore few actually succeed in a real sense. They cope. They hang in there to retirement, or they become hardened and bitter and recalcitrant.
I'm not just talking about working stiffs on the line and in administration. I'm talking about CEOs that fail again and again, but never suffer for their failure, because, you see, there is this old boys' club that doesn't want to strangle the golden goose.
While people are writing books on leadership, and always thinking of it in terms of persons in the singular and not people in the plural, a false economy moves higher and higher on imported cheap goods and tighter and tighter bottom lines that only impact the people in the plural, not persons in the singular, not the CEOs, not the so-called "leaders."
We don't have leaders. We have pontiffs. And pontiffs are always attempting to solidify their power, confident that tradition will support them, while accepting collateral damage such as redundancy, merging, streamlining, and whatever new nomenclature is invented to cover their failure as the price of doing business.
I am heading for Europe, which is a microcosm of the US in about every way, and is apparently caving in to the same detritus. Take the Roman Catholic Church of Rome.
We don't have enough trouble with Islam, but Pope Benedict XVI has taken this moment to claim the primacy of Catholicism. He now is driving a wedge between Catholics and Protestants and Jews that Pope John XXIII attempted to repair with the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.
Pope Benedict is even going further by bringing back the Latin Mass to the enthusiastic approval of such conservatives as Patrick Buchanan, who incidentally once ran for president of the US.
In the more than seven decades of my life, leaders of the church and state and business have played quick and dirty with my conscience and loyalty, and I am not alone. Science has done the same by saying "we should do this" and then later say "we shouldn't," as they float in the same surreal world of their collective hubris.
People in the plural are caught in this quagmire.
There is a syndicated voice, a man named David Brooks, who seems to sees this with engaging clarity. He writes a syndicated column from his New York Times desk, and can be seen weekly on the "News Hour with Jim Leherer" on PBS television.
Today's column wasn't about leaders, but people in the plural, specifically young women and their music. He mentioned three songs and how these songs depict modern women in terms of dissonance and disconnection. He writes:
“This character is hard-boiled, foul-mouthed, fed-up, emotionally self-sufficient and unforgiving. She’s like one of those battle-hardened combat vets, who’s had the sentimentality beaten out of her and who no longer has time for romance or etiquette.
“This character is obviously a product of the cold-eyed age of divorce and hookups. It’s also a product of the free-floating anger that’s part of the climate of the decade.”
He continues, “Once, young people came a-calling as part of courtship. Then they had dating and going steady. But the rules of courtship have dissolved. They’ve been replaced by ambiguity and uncertainty. Cell phones, Facebook and text messages give people access to hundreds of ‘friends.’ That only increases the fluidity, drama and anxiety.”
I mention this column and these remarks in this context because these young people are the litmus test of our society. It has gravitated to this, and it won’t change by declaring the primacy of a faith, or bringing back a Latin Mass. Nor will it change by celebrating the achievements of a few who have led businesses to profitabilty, often under suspect clouds.
Society, and the people that make up society are being punished by their leaders for not behaving instead of the leaders attempting to understand how things have gotten out of hand.
People need intimacy, need to belong, need to feel they are part of something bigger than themselves. They need to love in order to be loving. They need to trust themselves and often the reason they distrust themselves so badly is because of misplaced trust in their leadership.
If it sounds as if I have a harangue against the Roman Catholic Church, I would be misread. My soul has been cauterized by this faith, and I have come to accept that its programming, discipline, and continuity are as much apart of my writing as my spirit. I mention this only to gauge the context of this content. It is because of my church that I’ve always been fascinated with leadership.
Leadership, I have found, does not know itself because it projects the ideal of being rational, cognitive, disciplined and temperate, when all the transitions from stuckness to unstuckness have come when the temperate spirit was let loose into a fire in the mind. Martin Luther comes to mind in that sense. He would not be happy with Pope Benedict.
____________
Dr. Fisher’s latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). Check with the publisher for more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/
Thursday, July 12, 2007
A MEASURE OF STUCKNESS: The Forgotten Legacy of Our Ideas!
A MEASURE OF STUCKNESS: The Forgotten Legacy of Our Ideas!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Do diddle di do,
Poor Jim Jay
Got stuck fast
In Yesterday.”
Walter De La Mare (1973 – 1956), English poet and novelist
Now that we are engaged in the quadrennial madness of presidential campaigning for the presidency, which is eighteen months away, but in which only the coin counting mafia are likely to survive to convention time next year, we might reflect on the legacy of some ideas.
The hopefuls talk is of change, of a fresh view of things, and decisive answers to the most perplexing problems of the time, while stuck in empty rhetoric.
Presidential campaigners smile a lot, are well organized, and know how to get people to pledge their hard earned money for their campaigns. It is a cultural carnival atmosphere that has been going on for more than two hundred years in this country, reaching new levels of absurdity and profligacy with each passing quadrennial cycle.
Campaigners are likely to spend a combined total of $1 billion before their respective party conventions to nominate a person for the office of the Presidency of the United States. Whomever is nominated and subsequently elected, that person no longer has a free ride toward cavalier foreign engagements.
A voice out of the past once swam against the current of the sharks. A hundred years before the Iraq War this American said:
"The transformation of native friendliness to execration; the demoralization of our army, from the war office down – forgery decorated, torture whitewashed, massacre condoned; the creation of a chronic anarchy, the deliberate reinflaming on our part ancient tribal animosities. These things, I say, or things like them, were clearly foretold. "
He was speaking of the American invasion of the Philippines in 1903 and the bloody and embarrassing consequences of that action. America was in quest of being taken seriously by the world community. This found it embracing the hubris and hegemony of empire, for which the Greeks, Romans, Spanish and English had set precedence.
On another occasion, 1896, Theodore Roosevelt, then commissioner of police in New York City, questioned the patriotism of anyone who dare criticize President Grover Cleveland’s belligerent policy in Venezuela. Teddy Roosevelt's bust now graces Mount Rushmore, a man who sounded suspiciously Cheneyist more than one hundred years ago.
Again, this man who found himself in the land of stuckness had the audacity to publish a public letter stating “that in this university we shall be patriotic enough not to remain passive while the destinies of our country are being settled by surprise.”
Five years and counting after the commencement of the War in Afghanistan and Iraq, these words echo a tired and unheeded refrain.
George Orwell is famous for saying, "in the new state peace will mean war," but this man said it a half century before Orwell’s novel “1984” was published in 1948.
Then there is the trio of Sigmund Freud and James Joyce and Virginia Woolf who are famous for their twentieth century “stream of consciousness” thinking and writing. This man invented the term, as well as the philosophy and psychology behind it in 1884.
Who was this man who was out ahead of so many others?
Well, for starters, he was a peculiar duck. He looked backward to see ahead, being behind or beside or above his contemporaries in thought, idea and deed.
He was the weird son of an even weirder father, a father who inherited so much wealth that he never had to work, and didn’t want his children to work either, but to explore and travel and become immersed in other cultures, languages, religions and traditions.
The father was a devotee of the esoteric and the bizarre, and so was this son, bouncing hither and yon between science and mysticism, while entertaining and even coming to believe some of the signature crackpots of his day.
How could someone with such a disorderly youth come to have such an orderly mind?
Simple. He was never stuck while remaining vulnerable to quacks all his life.
He was an enigma, an individual, and an explorer with his own moral compass without a roadmap.
His father led the way flitting from Calvinism to Transcendentalism to Fourierism to Free Love, writing unwanted and unread books about them all. This famous son was even more adventuresome and some of his madness has come to stay with us as the pathology of our current normalcy.
For instance, he ran experiments on himself from electric shock treatment, to the injection of serums from bull or goat testicles, practiced hypnotism and anesthetic trance, experimented with mind cures and consumed various mood-altering chemicals.
These drugs included mescal, chloral hydrate, amyl nitrate, veronal, and chloroform. Clearly, he had his psychedelic "Sixties" about a century earlier.
He also regularly attended séances and was a strong supporter of the Society for Psychical Research, convinced that he could communicate with his dead friend “from the other side.”
He was a great fan of the borderline kook Gustav Fechner, who thought the earth was divine and should be prayed to, as well as the outright crank Benjamin Blood, who promoted anesthetic trances and held that each letter of the alphabet has its own personality.
How did such an eccentric man become, which he did, the major American thinker of his time?
Even today, he is vastly read with many of his ideas so solid in the American consciousness that they are accepted as givens without thinking such as pragmatism – i.e., the pursuit of the possible with purpose, will and habit. For our devotion to this idea, Americans are known as “pragmatists” around the world.
He became a doctor of medicine, who never practiced medicine, a professor who influenced the thinking of other great men such as W.E.B. Dubois, George Santayana, and Bernard Berenson. For this, we acclaim him as the father of American psychology and pragmatic philosophy.
What set him apart was he wasn’t afraid to be different, wasn’t afraid to grow, change, sort out life’s ambiguities and discover his art and science in the mix, which Americans have subsequently adopted largely as their own.
He never claimed to be finished, or comfortable with where or what he was. He was constantly experimenting to experience resurrection and rebirth. He didn’t just serve up ideas; he measured them, and for it he touched truth.
I am speaking of William James, the quintessential American of more than a century ago, a man who doesn’t fit comfortably into any stereotype. Even when he believed passionately in another man, say Emerson, or an idea, say eclectic rather than systematic philosophy, he was not blind to Emerson’s shortcomings or the limits of his own radical thought.
Nor was James in any sense a perfect man. He was volatile, easily bored, and moody, subject to depression and insomnia. He was also something of a hypochondriac. In his quest for new ideas, he often neglected his wife and children. And he could be rude bordering on insulting, as in the case when he rejected an invitation to become a member of the American Philosophical Society. Not only did he reject the invitation, but he also found it necessary to be insulting to its members.
Yet, in general, because of his lack of false airs and openness, he was likable, approachable, and respected because he was real.
The darkness he saw in the motivation of the high and mighty sometimes encouraged his critics to see him as a heavy handed pessimist and cynic, which couldn’t be further from the truth. He simply carried the DNA genetic code of the America spirit in his genes. As a consequence, he has never been forgotten or his ideas ignored.
His first book, The Principles of Psychology (1890) is still in print. It established the sphere of his thought and his concrete observations on consciousness, its complexity and the fringes of subliminal or unconscious awareness around it. He was abreast of Freud’s views, but didn’t get into the messiness of therapeutic speculation that has encumbered Freud’s legacy.
Later, he subjected religion to his pragmatic test in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901 – 1902), which mounted the difficult question: does religion work? He concluded it does.
Religion, to his thinking, wasn’t the source of the world’s troubles, but quite the reverse. Religion is its antidote. The politics of religion is its curse.
We all share the legacy of his influence, a legacy founded on never being stuck, never being imprisoned by convention, never being afraid to embrace the weird or the absurd to find a kernel of meaning in what otherwise seems meaningless.
William James was authentically American, and his kind is unlikely to be found on the current campaign trail. The reason?
He culled a philosophy out of the detritus of his life, while these candidates are mouthing words, ideas and causes designed for popular acclaim without such a foundation, demonstrating a measure of stuckness that he never experienced, and would pain him now to know.
_________
Dr. Fisher’s latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). For more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Do diddle di do,
Poor Jim Jay
Got stuck fast
In Yesterday.”
Walter De La Mare (1973 – 1956), English poet and novelist
Now that we are engaged in the quadrennial madness of presidential campaigning for the presidency, which is eighteen months away, but in which only the coin counting mafia are likely to survive to convention time next year, we might reflect on the legacy of some ideas.
The hopefuls talk is of change, of a fresh view of things, and decisive answers to the most perplexing problems of the time, while stuck in empty rhetoric.
Presidential campaigners smile a lot, are well organized, and know how to get people to pledge their hard earned money for their campaigns. It is a cultural carnival atmosphere that has been going on for more than two hundred years in this country, reaching new levels of absurdity and profligacy with each passing quadrennial cycle.
Campaigners are likely to spend a combined total of $1 billion before their respective party conventions to nominate a person for the office of the Presidency of the United States. Whomever is nominated and subsequently elected, that person no longer has a free ride toward cavalier foreign engagements.
A voice out of the past once swam against the current of the sharks. A hundred years before the Iraq War this American said:
"The transformation of native friendliness to execration; the demoralization of our army, from the war office down – forgery decorated, torture whitewashed, massacre condoned; the creation of a chronic anarchy, the deliberate reinflaming on our part ancient tribal animosities. These things, I say, or things like them, were clearly foretold. "
He was speaking of the American invasion of the Philippines in 1903 and the bloody and embarrassing consequences of that action. America was in quest of being taken seriously by the world community. This found it embracing the hubris and hegemony of empire, for which the Greeks, Romans, Spanish and English had set precedence.
On another occasion, 1896, Theodore Roosevelt, then commissioner of police in New York City, questioned the patriotism of anyone who dare criticize President Grover Cleveland’s belligerent policy in Venezuela. Teddy Roosevelt's bust now graces Mount Rushmore, a man who sounded suspiciously Cheneyist more than one hundred years ago.
Again, this man who found himself in the land of stuckness had the audacity to publish a public letter stating “that in this university we shall be patriotic enough not to remain passive while the destinies of our country are being settled by surprise.”
Five years and counting after the commencement of the War in Afghanistan and Iraq, these words echo a tired and unheeded refrain.
George Orwell is famous for saying, "in the new state peace will mean war," but this man said it a half century before Orwell’s novel “1984” was published in 1948.
Then there is the trio of Sigmund Freud and James Joyce and Virginia Woolf who are famous for their twentieth century “stream of consciousness” thinking and writing. This man invented the term, as well as the philosophy and psychology behind it in 1884.
Who was this man who was out ahead of so many others?
Well, for starters, he was a peculiar duck. He looked backward to see ahead, being behind or beside or above his contemporaries in thought, idea and deed.
He was the weird son of an even weirder father, a father who inherited so much wealth that he never had to work, and didn’t want his children to work either, but to explore and travel and become immersed in other cultures, languages, religions and traditions.
The father was a devotee of the esoteric and the bizarre, and so was this son, bouncing hither and yon between science and mysticism, while entertaining and even coming to believe some of the signature crackpots of his day.
How could someone with such a disorderly youth come to have such an orderly mind?
Simple. He was never stuck while remaining vulnerable to quacks all his life.
He was an enigma, an individual, and an explorer with his own moral compass without a roadmap.
His father led the way flitting from Calvinism to Transcendentalism to Fourierism to Free Love, writing unwanted and unread books about them all. This famous son was even more adventuresome and some of his madness has come to stay with us as the pathology of our current normalcy.
For instance, he ran experiments on himself from electric shock treatment, to the injection of serums from bull or goat testicles, practiced hypnotism and anesthetic trance, experimented with mind cures and consumed various mood-altering chemicals.
These drugs included mescal, chloral hydrate, amyl nitrate, veronal, and chloroform. Clearly, he had his psychedelic "Sixties" about a century earlier.
He also regularly attended séances and was a strong supporter of the Society for Psychical Research, convinced that he could communicate with his dead friend “from the other side.”
He was a great fan of the borderline kook Gustav Fechner, who thought the earth was divine and should be prayed to, as well as the outright crank Benjamin Blood, who promoted anesthetic trances and held that each letter of the alphabet has its own personality.
How did such an eccentric man become, which he did, the major American thinker of his time?
Even today, he is vastly read with many of his ideas so solid in the American consciousness that they are accepted as givens without thinking such as pragmatism – i.e., the pursuit of the possible with purpose, will and habit. For our devotion to this idea, Americans are known as “pragmatists” around the world.
He became a doctor of medicine, who never practiced medicine, a professor who influenced the thinking of other great men such as W.E.B. Dubois, George Santayana, and Bernard Berenson. For this, we acclaim him as the father of American psychology and pragmatic philosophy.
What set him apart was he wasn’t afraid to be different, wasn’t afraid to grow, change, sort out life’s ambiguities and discover his art and science in the mix, which Americans have subsequently adopted largely as their own.
He never claimed to be finished, or comfortable with where or what he was. He was constantly experimenting to experience resurrection and rebirth. He didn’t just serve up ideas; he measured them, and for it he touched truth.
I am speaking of William James, the quintessential American of more than a century ago, a man who doesn’t fit comfortably into any stereotype. Even when he believed passionately in another man, say Emerson, or an idea, say eclectic rather than systematic philosophy, he was not blind to Emerson’s shortcomings or the limits of his own radical thought.
Nor was James in any sense a perfect man. He was volatile, easily bored, and moody, subject to depression and insomnia. He was also something of a hypochondriac. In his quest for new ideas, he often neglected his wife and children. And he could be rude bordering on insulting, as in the case when he rejected an invitation to become a member of the American Philosophical Society. Not only did he reject the invitation, but he also found it necessary to be insulting to its members.
Yet, in general, because of his lack of false airs and openness, he was likable, approachable, and respected because he was real.
The darkness he saw in the motivation of the high and mighty sometimes encouraged his critics to see him as a heavy handed pessimist and cynic, which couldn’t be further from the truth. He simply carried the DNA genetic code of the America spirit in his genes. As a consequence, he has never been forgotten or his ideas ignored.
His first book, The Principles of Psychology (1890) is still in print. It established the sphere of his thought and his concrete observations on consciousness, its complexity and the fringes of subliminal or unconscious awareness around it. He was abreast of Freud’s views, but didn’t get into the messiness of therapeutic speculation that has encumbered Freud’s legacy.
Later, he subjected religion to his pragmatic test in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901 – 1902), which mounted the difficult question: does religion work? He concluded it does.
Religion, to his thinking, wasn’t the source of the world’s troubles, but quite the reverse. Religion is its antidote. The politics of religion is its curse.
We all share the legacy of his influence, a legacy founded on never being stuck, never being imprisoned by convention, never being afraid to embrace the weird or the absurd to find a kernel of meaning in what otherwise seems meaningless.
William James was authentically American, and his kind is unlikely to be found on the current campaign trail. The reason?
He culled a philosophy out of the detritus of his life, while these candidates are mouthing words, ideas and causes designed for popular acclaim without such a foundation, demonstrating a measure of stuckness that he never experienced, and would pain him now to know.
_________
Dr. Fisher’s latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). For more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
SUCCESS WARREN BUFFET STYLE -- WOULD YOU HIDE ME?
SUCCESS WARREN BUFFET STYLE -- WOULD YOU HIDE ME?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Success is not a measure of what you get but what you give.”
Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the world, and a billionaire many times over, prefers to talk to young people who are attempting to figure out their life’s plan rather than rich people who want only to get richer.
“They are primarily interested in how I can improve their portfolio,” he confesses, “because they have this narrow sense of what success is or what it entails.”
This is how this kind man began to answer a student who asked the question how would he define success.
Mr. Buffet smiled that kindly grandfatherly smile of his, and said, “I’d like to tell you a story about what I consider success, and I think it might surprise you.”
The story he told was of a friend of his who had survived the Nazi Holocaust. She was a little girl then, now in her seventies. She lost her parents and relatives in concentration camps in 1942, but managed to survive because others were willing at great risk to themselves to hide her.
“I have come to believe the absolute measure of success is simply that,” she told Mr. Buffet, “would someone be willing to hide you at great risk to themselves?”
It got the great philanthropist to ponder the question. He wondered, would my friends hide me? Would my family hide me? Would my children hide me if there were pressing danger and involve great personal risk to them?
This, for him, was the ultimate question. Would others show the compassion and caring, kindness and concern to shelter you from your enemies, from the terror that formed a ring of danger around you, from the hostile world that was collapsing in on you? They would be there, he concluded, when you had nowhere else to turn or to go, if you had been there for them in the conduct of your life.
Then he grew philosophical. To have a friend you must be a friend. To have others take risks and hide you, to consider you part of them and integral to them, there must be some semblance of behavior that exemplifies your life as complement to theirs.
Being successfully hidden at great risk to others would prove your inclusion in their community.
You cannot write a check for a $1 million and expect others to hide you.
You cannot intimate others to hide you when you have used race, religion, ethnicity, economics or politics to separate you from them.
They will hide you because you are part of them and they are part of you, and that is so because your life has been a textbook of caring, of doing for others what they cannot do for themselves, for showing kindness and understanding, tolerance and concern for others less fortunate who cannot seem to keep up, or who encounter misfortune through no fault of their own.
You have shown in your life that you are not separate from others, that you do not consider yourself better than others because you are richer or brighter, more accomplished or celebrated.
If that is the case, they will hide you. No success is greater than being hidden from your oppressors so that you can triumph another day.
Then he grew serious with his head bowed, and confessed that many still equate success with how much they have and not how much they can give of themselves to others.
They cheat and steal, bare false witness and lie to realize advantage over others, never dreaming of the day that they might need to be hidden from their enemies, enemies that chase and seek them out to crush and kill them, when their only crime had been being insensitive to the plight of other less fortunate.
Warren Buffet has willed the bulk of his multibillion dollar estate to the Bill & Kathy Gates Foundation, where he applauds the great work they are doing for others, work that he admits, he has not the organizational or delivery skills that they possess. A humble man, Warren Buffet is a humanitarian, who wears this badge quietly and unobtrusively. No question, he would be hidden.
______________
Dr. Fisher’s most recent book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). For more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/.
.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Success is not a measure of what you get but what you give.”
Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the world, and a billionaire many times over, prefers to talk to young people who are attempting to figure out their life’s plan rather than rich people who want only to get richer.
“They are primarily interested in how I can improve their portfolio,” he confesses, “because they have this narrow sense of what success is or what it entails.”
This is how this kind man began to answer a student who asked the question how would he define success.
Mr. Buffet smiled that kindly grandfatherly smile of his, and said, “I’d like to tell you a story about what I consider success, and I think it might surprise you.”
The story he told was of a friend of his who had survived the Nazi Holocaust. She was a little girl then, now in her seventies. She lost her parents and relatives in concentration camps in 1942, but managed to survive because others were willing at great risk to themselves to hide her.
“I have come to believe the absolute measure of success is simply that,” she told Mr. Buffet, “would someone be willing to hide you at great risk to themselves?”
It got the great philanthropist to ponder the question. He wondered, would my friends hide me? Would my family hide me? Would my children hide me if there were pressing danger and involve great personal risk to them?
This, for him, was the ultimate question. Would others show the compassion and caring, kindness and concern to shelter you from your enemies, from the terror that formed a ring of danger around you, from the hostile world that was collapsing in on you? They would be there, he concluded, when you had nowhere else to turn or to go, if you had been there for them in the conduct of your life.
Then he grew philosophical. To have a friend you must be a friend. To have others take risks and hide you, to consider you part of them and integral to them, there must be some semblance of behavior that exemplifies your life as complement to theirs.
Being successfully hidden at great risk to others would prove your inclusion in their community.
You cannot write a check for a $1 million and expect others to hide you.
You cannot intimate others to hide you when you have used race, religion, ethnicity, economics or politics to separate you from them.
They will hide you because you are part of them and they are part of you, and that is so because your life has been a textbook of caring, of doing for others what they cannot do for themselves, for showing kindness and understanding, tolerance and concern for others less fortunate who cannot seem to keep up, or who encounter misfortune through no fault of their own.
You have shown in your life that you are not separate from others, that you do not consider yourself better than others because you are richer or brighter, more accomplished or celebrated.
If that is the case, they will hide you. No success is greater than being hidden from your oppressors so that you can triumph another day.
Then he grew serious with his head bowed, and confessed that many still equate success with how much they have and not how much they can give of themselves to others.
They cheat and steal, bare false witness and lie to realize advantage over others, never dreaming of the day that they might need to be hidden from their enemies, enemies that chase and seek them out to crush and kill them, when their only crime had been being insensitive to the plight of other less fortunate.
Warren Buffet has willed the bulk of his multibillion dollar estate to the Bill & Kathy Gates Foundation, where he applauds the great work they are doing for others, work that he admits, he has not the organizational or delivery skills that they possess. A humble man, Warren Buffet is a humanitarian, who wears this badge quietly and unobtrusively. No question, he would be hidden.
______________
Dr. Fisher’s most recent book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). For more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/.
.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
CORPOCRACY & SMOKING -- GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER!
CORPOCRACY & SMOKING – GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Health is the greatest of all possessions; a pale cobble is better than a sick king.”
Isaac Bickerstaff (1735 – 1812), English dramatist
ABSTRACT:
We are packing to move on to Europe for a cruise in the Baltic Sea, visiting old haunts in England, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, Germany and Finland, and some new ones in Estonia and Russia.
You have come to know me as a writer-in-cyberspace with what I read, think and reflect against the tapestry of my life.
Reading has always provoked thinking and reflection against that experience. I do this not so much to put you in touch with me as to put you in touch with yourself.
It is hard for us to give ourselves permission to reflect on our lives other than what that Great Seer in the Sky, the corporation, tells us we should think, feel, believe, as well as what is true and what is not, therefore, how we should behave.
I am a product of that corporation but have never joined it. From an early age, I was suspect of it motives, choosing instead to use it as my laboratory. This is made clear in my writings. Indeed, I’ve taken comfort in being an outsider in a world craving to be insiders, and have known a kind of freedom for the detachment.
This brings me to the subject of this missive, smoking and the cigarette industry. Allan M. Brandt does a valuable public service in his new book, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (Basic Books 2007). Some of his research and insights appear here, along with my continuing weariness of corpocracy, the new dominant force that touches us all. The cigarette industry is but one aspect of this colossus.
WHAT CIGARETTE SMOKING DOES
Repeated exposure to nicotine distorts the brain system responsible for cognitive awareness, and a sense of well-being, so that the smoker comes to crave the chemical.
WHO SMOKES?
Smoking rates are especially high among the poor and the mentally ill, perhaps because they can afford few other consolations and because the mild antidepressant effects of smoking make quitting especially difficult. Yet, across the board, one in five adult Americans today (2007) of all socioeconomic circumstances continues to smoke.
WHEN DID WE KNOW SMOKING WAS OF HIGH RISK?
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, practically everyone knew that smoking was risky. What they didn't know was that smoking was extremely risky.
Smokers who consume a pack of cigarettes a day are fifty times more likely to contract lung cancer than nonsmokers. According to the American Cancer Society, "about half of all Americans who persist in continuing to smoke will die because of the habit."
Diseases related to tobacco account for 20 percent of all deaths in the United States each year.
WHEN DID CORPORATE MALFEASANCE REACH ITS MOST CALLOUS LEVEL?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
“Health is the greatest of all possessions; a pale cobble is better than a sick king.”
Isaac Bickerstaff (1735 – 1812), English dramatist
ABSTRACT:
We are packing to move on to Europe for a cruise in the Baltic Sea, visiting old haunts in England, Sweden, Belgium, Denmark, Germany and Finland, and some new ones in Estonia and Russia.
You have come to know me as a writer-in-cyberspace with what I read, think and reflect against the tapestry of my life.
Reading has always provoked thinking and reflection against that experience. I do this not so much to put you in touch with me as to put you in touch with yourself.
It is hard for us to give ourselves permission to reflect on our lives other than what that Great Seer in the Sky, the corporation, tells us we should think, feel, believe, as well as what is true and what is not, therefore, how we should behave.
I am a product of that corporation but have never joined it. From an early age, I was suspect of it motives, choosing instead to use it as my laboratory. This is made clear in my writings. Indeed, I’ve taken comfort in being an outsider in a world craving to be insiders, and have known a kind of freedom for the detachment.
This brings me to the subject of this missive, smoking and the cigarette industry. Allan M. Brandt does a valuable public service in his new book, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America (Basic Books 2007). Some of his research and insights appear here, along with my continuing weariness of corpocracy, the new dominant force that touches us all. The cigarette industry is but one aspect of this colossus.
WHAT CIGARETTE SMOKING DOES
Repeated exposure to nicotine distorts the brain system responsible for cognitive awareness, and a sense of well-being, so that the smoker comes to crave the chemical.
WHO SMOKES?
Smoking rates are especially high among the poor and the mentally ill, perhaps because they can afford few other consolations and because the mild antidepressant effects of smoking make quitting especially difficult. Yet, across the board, one in five adult Americans today (2007) of all socioeconomic circumstances continues to smoke.
WHEN DID WE KNOW SMOKING WAS OF HIGH RISK?
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, practically everyone knew that smoking was risky. What they didn't know was that smoking was extremely risky.
Smokers who consume a pack of cigarettes a day are fifty times more likely to contract lung cancer than nonsmokers. According to the American Cancer Society, "about half of all Americans who persist in continuing to smoke will die because of the habit."
Diseases related to tobacco account for 20 percent of all deaths in the United States each year.
WHEN DID CORPORATE MALFEASANCE REACH ITS MOST CALLOUS LEVEL?
Beginning in the 1980s, a number of former smokers suffering from cancer sued the tobacco companies for having misled them about just how dangerous smoking was.
For a corporation to withhold accurate health information is not only against the law, it is also a violation of human rights, according to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Facing ruin, tobacco companies launched an army of corporate attorneys on these former smokers and won many of their cases, and even when they lost, the resulting settlements forced them to change their message but not their devious tactics.
The cigarette industry’s main legal defense was based on an illogical set of assumptions: the risks of smoking were “unproven”; that consumers had been sufficiently warned about whatever risks existed, and thus the companies were not responsible for health problems. Some juries were actually convinced by these arguments.
WHEN DID IT ALL START?
The first mass-produced cigarettes appeared on the market in the 1880s in the United States. But cigarette smoking in America really took off after World War I. The nation was changing rapidly from ethnic concentrated communities into local communities with largely local economies driven by a new mass consumer culture.
The corporation was born which increasingly fed, clothed, transported, and entertained the masses under the broad umbrella of corpocracy.
Assembly-line production in everything from hand tools to automobiles to toothpaste enabled companies to produce goods ever more cheaply with brand advertising through newspapers, magazines and the radio vastly expanding their markets into every cranny of society.
At the same time, America’s moral climate was also changing becoming increasingly secular and individualistic. Smoking once considered vulgar and a degenerate habit, limited to people on the fringe such as merchant marine sailors, bourgeoisie artists and the dregs of society, came to symbolize the new liberated optimists of the 1920s. Everybody who was anybody smoked!
The themes of cigarette advertising were carefree, slick and therapeutic. Chesterfield cigarettes associated its product with sex, depicting couples languishing in the moonlight. “Blow my way,” the woman says, to her man who is smoking a cigarette. Philip Morris aimed at the sophisticated smoker; Lucky Strikes appealed to women on the rise with playfully rebellious slogans: “Women! Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!”
Already in the 1930s, with suspicion about the damaging health effects of smoking and cancer, there began to grow more of a reassuring and “scientific” tone to the marketing of cigarettes.
Doctors were featured heavily in advertisements. In one ad for Camels, a handsome young physician wearing a head-mirror advises, “Give your throat a vacation. Smoke a Camel.” In another ad, an older doctor with a warm smile and a pince-nez holds a pack of Lucky Strikes and states, “20,679 Physicians say, ‘Luckies are less irritating.”
In the 1950s, when I was in college, practically every professor smoked in class as well as 90 percent of the women. Curiously, far less men appeared to smoke in class for some reason. Everything was seen through the smoke of this classroom haze. You would think a nonsmoker, such as myself, would complain, but we took it as part of the ambience to a college education.
Even so, by the 1950s, a link was revealed between smoking and lung cancer by epidemiological studies in England (Richard Doll and Austen Bradford Hill) and the United States (Ernst Wynder and Evarts Graham). Moreover, they discovered lung cancer had tripled in just thirty years (1920 – 1950).
People were dying, but strangely enough, it failed to create much excitement, although an article in “The Reader’s Digest” had the caption “Cancer by the Carton.” Not to worry,
Americans demonstrated their insouciance by increasing their smoking rate in the 1950s by 20 percent.
WHY DON’T PEOPLE LISTEN TO HEALTH WARNINGS?
There is still no clear answer today. Some claim Americans are fatalistic, “You’ve got to die from something, why not enjoy it with cancer sticks?”
The clearest evidence -- despite the attempts of health promoters to direct volumes of research to the mind of the smoker, and to show the clear habitual nature of smoking -- is that the tobacco companies have cut them off at the pass.
Cigarette manufacturers have been highly successful in launching campaigns of half-truths and outright falsehoods to cast doubt on lung cancer studies. This has given people the impression that the habit cannot be all that dangerous if there is so much controversy around these studies.
Yet, smokers and nonsmokers, alike, know of someone within their intimate circle that has died of emphysema or some other smoking related illness. The danger is huge and there is little justification for controversy.
My own mother died of emphysema. Otherwise, she was the picture of health. It was not pretty to watch her die, as I have written (In the Shadow of the Courthouse AuthorHouse 2003). Yet, when I talked to my mother’s nurse, and said, “Seeing this would convince any smoker to quit.” She looked at me, and said simply, “I smoke,” and walked away.
Tobacco companies in 1953 issued a frank statement to cigarette smoking, which was published across the country in newspapers. The statement claimed emphatically that cigarette smoking was not injurious to heath, and that more research was needed into the question.
In typical corpocracy fashion, the industry created the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC). This was meant to create the impression the industry was taking the health issue seriously. Its main function proved however to be public relations.
Having once been in research & development, I can imagine some underpaid scientists willing to receive tobacco company grants “to find possible evidence of a link between smoking and cancer,” and then to publish their “findings” with the full support of their grantors.
Part of my work in R& D was to find ways to circumvent patents held by competitors, whereas these scientists working for tobacco companies were often subtly encouraged to use these grants to search for causes of cancer other than cigarettes, for example, possible genetic or environmental linkages. They were even encouraged to find beneficial effects of smoking.
When these tobacco company-funded researchers found evidence that cigarette smoke was loaded with carcinogens, their results were suppressed. Incredibly, none of these scientists complained.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that a small number of tobacco-industry “whistle-blowers” came forward. Still, nothing changed. TIRC continued to issue the mantra: “There is no conclusive proof of a link between smoking and cancer,” although the tobacco industry had such proof locked safely away.
In the midst of this, the tobacco industry benefited from a general skepticism on the part of the public concerning statistics, and from the opposition of doctors toward the science of epidemiology, a relatively new discipline.
At the time, few doctors were trained in either statistics or epidemiology, and some may have sensed that the epidemiologists posed a threat to their position as the premier authorities on health issues.
In fact in the 1960s, the American Medical Association, a corpocracy in its own right, accepted $15 million in research grants from the TIRC, and then maintained from this research that the links between smoking and cancer were “unproven.”
This was despite the US Surgeon General in 1964 issuing a report confirming the linkage. The following year Congress passed the Cigarette Labeling Act, which eventually was watered down to a “warning” by the successful lobbying of tobacco companies.
The charade continued. A growing number of brands now came out with filtered versions. Filters are cosmetic and do not reduce the risks of smoking, but half of smokers believed they did.
“Light” cigarettes were marketed as “milder” when they were more addictive because the increased nicotine. Interestingly enough, the tobacco industry never claimed “low-tar” cigarettes were safer. The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association did it instead, claiming low-tar brands “were below the critical threshold of risk of disease.” There was scant evidence at the time in support of this claim, which we now know to be absolutely false.
In the midst of all this jockeying, tobacco companies put doctors and health on the shelf and returned to their original theme of cigarette smoking being more fun and an expression of freedom, rebellion and a ticket to inclusive company.
WHEN THE FANTASY BUBBLE BURST
By the 1980s, a smoker was dying every eight seconds somewhere in the United States. Cigarettes were killing more than 400,000 Americans every year.
Meanwhile, individuals and states launched suits against the tobacco companies. Not to be deterred, CEOs of these companies appeared imperiously confident before the US Congress, and challenged these figures while claiming cigarette smoking was safe.
Too many people were dying, many of them public figures, for this performance to prevent the fantasy bubble from bursting. In 1985, a New Jersey judge ruled that the public had a “right to know what the tobacco companies knew and know about the risks of cigarette smoking and what it did or did not do with regard to that knowledge.”
It turned out that the industry had for years suppressed its own research linking cigarettes to cancer.
In the 1970s, it had developed a cigarette that was safer but never marketed because it would amount to admitting guilt.
Then there was the problem that “low-tar” cigarettes contained less nicotine, and therefore were less addictive. So what did some companies in the industry do? They added more nicotine to their “Light” brands.
Today, smoking rates are down by 50 percent from the high of the 1960s. Some 40 million Americans have quit smoking; yet million of Americans still smoke.
More importantly, it appears that lung cancer rates have finally peaked. It is now apparent that changes in behavior are possible when people have the right warnings and sufficient supportive information to convince them that they should change. The horror is that until the twenty-first century most Americans had neither; nor do billions of people around the world that continue to smoke at alarming rates.
GENIUS OF CORPOCRACY
The genius of tobacco companies is that the industry continues to be successful in attracting “replacement smokers,” a euphemism for teenagers and young adults. These smokers have a sense of immortality with years ahead of them “to quit,” failing to realize they are being ticketed to replace dead smokers.
One of the many cruelties of smoking-related illnesses today is that smokers have a sense of shame for being so crippled by the disease of smoking, as if they deserve their fate, as if they, alone, are responsible for their cupidity. The disembodied corporation is by implication exonerated, after all, it is just a business confined to legal and not moral statues.
Few realize how heartlessly corpocracy has lied to smokers, how it has confused them with its campaign of reassurance; how it has abandoned them with this cavalier sentiment:
“Nobody forced smokers to smoke. In accordance with the law, we posted warnings on the cigarette cartons for them to read.” Therefore, we are neither complicit in nor responsible for their fate. It belongs wholly to them, the smokers.”
_______________
Dr. Fisher’s latest book is A Look Back To See Ahead (2007). For information regarding this book, contact http://www.authorhouse.com/.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
REFLECTIONS ON INDEPENDENCE DAY, JULY 4, 2007
REFLECTIONS ON INDEPENDENCE DAY, JULY 4, 2007
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
PICTURE WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS!
The Tampa Tribune on this Fourth of July in the year 2007 has an editorial cartoon on its editorial page created by someone named "Stanto."
The boxed picture to the left shows the "Founding Fathers" around an ornate table in formal dress of the late eighteenth century with the boxed caption, "LEADERS, THEN."
The boxed picture to the right shows the same ornate room and setting with virtually every seat empty with the simple caption, "TODAY."
It is no less than the great French leader Napoleon Bonaparte who is attributed to have said, "A picture is worth a thousand words." Indeed.
LEADERSHIP'S WISTFUL MIND
I have labored through many articles and books to point out this blatant void, as has Lee Iacocca of automotive fame. Iacocca's book on "where are the leaders" is no less tiring than my missives of a similar complaint. The oxygen has gone out of leadership but no one wants to hear it.
But perhaps something else is missing.
Perhaps we are looking back instead of ahead, using our rear view mirror to capture what is before our eyes, when it is not, failing to see what is looming over the horizon.
You need only turn your television on and listen to the people of Africa who are now being exploited by the Chinese as they once were by Europeans, sucking their vital resources from the ground, treating them as wage slaves, and giving them pittance for the trouble; or hear the complaints of workers in China, building the new massive economic state in a more controlled society where peasants from the countryside, illiterate and poor, are forced into the city to work while being denied their hard earned wages.
This is a mirror image of Europe in the sixteenth to nineteenth century when its own industrialization and Africa exploitation was rampant, or the United States in its nearly three hundred years of slavery.
Europeans and Americans have been there, done that, and now watch, and even participate in the new version of economic exploitation as Americans buy "China cheap" often of tainted food and toys, or American companies transplant their manufacturing and packaging plants to China shores in complicit exploitation of the poor and ignorant by proxy.
Closer to home we see the quadrennial madness of mannequins masquerading as persons of substance on the presidential campaign stump. They will spend when the dust settles as much as $1 billion in this pre-election campaigning to win the nomination of their party.
Not a single one of these campaigners will ask their constituents to tighten their greedy belts, make room for immigrants of suspect legitimacy, or wonder what motivates terrorists to be terrorists. Campaigners are in the business of reinforcing biases and appealing to the lowest common denominator in the elector's conscience. And the people are complicit in this charade because they like the attention phony as it is.
When you want a person's vote, you lie, you talk about change as if change is an anomaly when it is a constant, and you promise and promise and promise all the way to the White House, and then when you get there you deflect criticism with the distraction of fear or war or both.
This has been the menu of the seven decades of my life and it shows no evidence of changing.
Originality died a natural death when technology became the substitute for religion, the electronic age became surrogate for the personal, and the pace maker replaced the moral compass of the heart.
No one seems to want to bite the bullet and admit leaders no longer lead. Wall Street, which long ago left the track, distracts us from that fact by announcing that the United States now has a million millionaires.
Wealth is not wisdom. Wealth has shattered our perspective and fragmented our society. The only reason wealth has reached celebrity prominence is because celebrity is skin deep and reflects the wistful times.
Leaders no longer lead in the home, the school, the church, the factory, the military, the government, indeed, society. Consequently, we are operating on synthetic life supports in a vacuum masquerading as "business as usual," when there is nothing usual about it as all the oxygen has been sucked out of life. Spontaneity is a product in cyberspace not of the neighborhood.
There has been a disconnect between leaders and followers because of a simple fact, a fact that continues to be avoided as if in denial it will disappear, and that fact is that people are waiting to be taken where they want to go, when they don't know where that is, and leaders are in a guessing game as to where the masses seem to be heading, so as to quickly run to catch up and appear in the lead. Where is Erasmus when you need him?
This is not a national problem or even an international problem. It is global fact.
We are running out of room as well as on empty, and madness is in the air with the hope of quelling this madness with panaceas, which only exacerbates the situation.
Fear is the condiment of choice and saber rattling is still what leaders fall back on when they are lost in their own confusion.
After a century of war, the diet for war has not abated.
The poor, the disenfranchised, the ignorant, and the disillusioned fight these wars, and the collateral damage is to have 100 casualties of the innocent for every soldier lost, wherever the war is fought and for whatever the reason, the village is destroyed over and over again to save it.
In my latest book (A Look Back To See Ahead) I quote an essay of mine that was published in the St. Petersburg Times Evening Independent on January 1, 1976, the year of our two hundred birthday.
That was thirty-one years ago. I thought we were on the brink of growing up. I was wrong. Here is what I wrote in a chapter titled in my new book, "Leadership's Wistful Mind of Its Time":
"America is dead! Long live America! On the even our two-hundredth birthday, we have been shocked awake from our illusory dream. We have discovered belatedly that success is in the mind and not the body politic; that being Numero Uno is reaching after a child's fantasy; that progress carries the seeds of its own destruction. American remains like a child with the focus always on "becoming," rather than on "being"; on the competitive drive rather than on cooperation; on the illusion of progress rather than reality. But alas! Thanks to a decade of corrupt and incompetent leadership, the wasting of our natural resources, the impatience of youth, and discriminated minorities, the dream has died, and in doing so, we have embraced despair. We will not grow up. Thus, on the even of our two-hundredth birthday, we are in a mourning period for our cherished illusions and protected fantasies. In the end, time runs out on a nation's adolescence. The youth must die to give birth to the man. That is why I proclaim, 'America is dead! Long live America!'" (A Look Back to See Ahead, p. 71)
_______________
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is published by AuthorHouse. The book is published in both hard and soft bound copy with complete notes, index, and bibliography. Contact information of publisher: http://www.authorhouse.com/
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007
PICTURE WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS!
The Tampa Tribune on this Fourth of July in the year 2007 has an editorial cartoon on its editorial page created by someone named "Stanto."
The boxed picture to the left shows the "Founding Fathers" around an ornate table in formal dress of the late eighteenth century with the boxed caption, "LEADERS, THEN."
The boxed picture to the right shows the same ornate room and setting with virtually every seat empty with the simple caption, "TODAY."
It is no less than the great French leader Napoleon Bonaparte who is attributed to have said, "A picture is worth a thousand words." Indeed.
LEADERSHIP'S WISTFUL MIND
I have labored through many articles and books to point out this blatant void, as has Lee Iacocca of automotive fame. Iacocca's book on "where are the leaders" is no less tiring than my missives of a similar complaint. The oxygen has gone out of leadership but no one wants to hear it.
But perhaps something else is missing.
Perhaps we are looking back instead of ahead, using our rear view mirror to capture what is before our eyes, when it is not, failing to see what is looming over the horizon.
You need only turn your television on and listen to the people of Africa who are now being exploited by the Chinese as they once were by Europeans, sucking their vital resources from the ground, treating them as wage slaves, and giving them pittance for the trouble; or hear the complaints of workers in China, building the new massive economic state in a more controlled society where peasants from the countryside, illiterate and poor, are forced into the city to work while being denied their hard earned wages.
This is a mirror image of Europe in the sixteenth to nineteenth century when its own industrialization and Africa exploitation was rampant, or the United States in its nearly three hundred years of slavery.
Europeans and Americans have been there, done that, and now watch, and even participate in the new version of economic exploitation as Americans buy "China cheap" often of tainted food and toys, or American companies transplant their manufacturing and packaging plants to China shores in complicit exploitation of the poor and ignorant by proxy.
Closer to home we see the quadrennial madness of mannequins masquerading as persons of substance on the presidential campaign stump. They will spend when the dust settles as much as $1 billion in this pre-election campaigning to win the nomination of their party.
Not a single one of these campaigners will ask their constituents to tighten their greedy belts, make room for immigrants of suspect legitimacy, or wonder what motivates terrorists to be terrorists. Campaigners are in the business of reinforcing biases and appealing to the lowest common denominator in the elector's conscience. And the people are complicit in this charade because they like the attention phony as it is.
When you want a person's vote, you lie, you talk about change as if change is an anomaly when it is a constant, and you promise and promise and promise all the way to the White House, and then when you get there you deflect criticism with the distraction of fear or war or both.
This has been the menu of the seven decades of my life and it shows no evidence of changing.
Originality died a natural death when technology became the substitute for religion, the electronic age became surrogate for the personal, and the pace maker replaced the moral compass of the heart.
No one seems to want to bite the bullet and admit leaders no longer lead. Wall Street, which long ago left the track, distracts us from that fact by announcing that the United States now has a million millionaires.
Wealth is not wisdom. Wealth has shattered our perspective and fragmented our society. The only reason wealth has reached celebrity prominence is because celebrity is skin deep and reflects the wistful times.
Leaders no longer lead in the home, the school, the church, the factory, the military, the government, indeed, society. Consequently, we are operating on synthetic life supports in a vacuum masquerading as "business as usual," when there is nothing usual about it as all the oxygen has been sucked out of life. Spontaneity is a product in cyberspace not of the neighborhood.
There has been a disconnect between leaders and followers because of a simple fact, a fact that continues to be avoided as if in denial it will disappear, and that fact is that people are waiting to be taken where they want to go, when they don't know where that is, and leaders are in a guessing game as to where the masses seem to be heading, so as to quickly run to catch up and appear in the lead. Where is Erasmus when you need him?
This is not a national problem or even an international problem. It is global fact.
We are running out of room as well as on empty, and madness is in the air with the hope of quelling this madness with panaceas, which only exacerbates the situation.
Fear is the condiment of choice and saber rattling is still what leaders fall back on when they are lost in their own confusion.
After a century of war, the diet for war has not abated.
The poor, the disenfranchised, the ignorant, and the disillusioned fight these wars, and the collateral damage is to have 100 casualties of the innocent for every soldier lost, wherever the war is fought and for whatever the reason, the village is destroyed over and over again to save it.
In my latest book (A Look Back To See Ahead) I quote an essay of mine that was published in the St. Petersburg Times Evening Independent on January 1, 1976, the year of our two hundred birthday.
That was thirty-one years ago. I thought we were on the brink of growing up. I was wrong. Here is what I wrote in a chapter titled in my new book, "Leadership's Wistful Mind of Its Time":
"America is dead! Long live America! On the even our two-hundredth birthday, we have been shocked awake from our illusory dream. We have discovered belatedly that success is in the mind and not the body politic; that being Numero Uno is reaching after a child's fantasy; that progress carries the seeds of its own destruction. American remains like a child with the focus always on "becoming," rather than on "being"; on the competitive drive rather than on cooperation; on the illusion of progress rather than reality. But alas! Thanks to a decade of corrupt and incompetent leadership, the wasting of our natural resources, the impatience of youth, and discriminated minorities, the dream has died, and in doing so, we have embraced despair. We will not grow up. Thus, on the even of our two-hundredth birthday, we are in a mourning period for our cherished illusions and protected fantasies. In the end, time runs out on a nation's adolescence. The youth must die to give birth to the man. That is why I proclaim, 'America is dead! Long live America!'" (A Look Back to See Ahead, p. 71)
_______________
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is published by AuthorHouse. The book is published in both hard and soft bound copy with complete notes, index, and bibliography. Contact information of publisher: http://www.authorhouse.com/
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