DR. FISHER, PLEASE EXPLAIN YOURSELF!

DR. FISHER, PLEASE EXPLAIN YOURSELF!

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

“I can promise to be candid, though I may not be impartial.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“We are seemingly between two epochs: the dying Sensate culture of our magnificent yesterday and the coming Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow. We are living, thinking, and acting at the end of a brilliant six-hundred-year-long Senate day.”

Pitrim Sorokin

An emailer writes:

I’ve received your advance remarks to be made on your book tour in Iowa in September. With all due respect, Dr. Fisher, I take umbrage at your “counterintuitive” remarks. It is a word you especially favor. I imagine you mean it doesn’t make sense in a normal context consistent (again with a favorite expression of yours) “with our hard wiring.” I am mainly confused with your cavalier use of the term “leaderless leadership” and expressions “we are all leaders or none of us are.” Could you take a moment and explain yourself, as these brainteasers are relatively meaningless to me as matters now stand. If you respond, please send me a blind copy. Thank you.

THE MEANING OF WORDS, THE ESSENCE OF IDEAS

When you are at the advance stage of your life, as I am, where you can look back much further than you can look forward, and you are by nature a thinker, an idea guy, provocative words surface because they resonate with you, and cry out for attention.

There is always the danger you will trigger offense rather than insight, and fly over or under the reader’s radar. It is a risk the writer takes willingly.

In the opening pages of A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, I claim, my reason for writing the original essay was to stimulate the conscience of ordinary souls like myself, not scholars, not dilettantes, not specialists with these candid assertions:

I claim no authority but write from my perceptions, reading and experience.
We all have an interest in what makes people act the way they do.
We are all born wonderers and therefore all philosophers.
We are all born storytellers.
We are all selling something.

My writing is meant to trigger new ideas from the reader’s perspective with the objective of making connection.

Nothing is ever written in concrete in a world of constant change. This implies the wisdom of going with the flow. To resist rather than embrace this flow is to become stuck in fear and doubt, and know only misery. That record is clear on this.

THE GENESIS OF LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP

My sense is we see leaderless leadership everywhere but we are not looking. It has become part of our pathology of normalcy.

Leadership is a victim of the entropy of history. The answers no longer reside in the privileged few, but in the passive many. Paradoxically, stability now emanates from the bottom, up, not the top, down. Decisions from corporate mahogany row and academic ivory towers are being superseded in everyday life by decisions at the level of consequences. It is a painful time for everyone because this is counterintuitive to the way they have been programmed.

We are not happy campers; we have lost our moral compass and our way. Despite this, we have our foot to the floor on the brake and accelerator at once, burning up rubber and going nowhere. Frantic activity has replaced suitable action. We go along to get along until our security disappears. We don’t want to think; we want escape.

Consequently, we are stuck in forward inertia surrounded by our electronic wonders and toys of distraction failing to understand what is happening or why.

We have destroyed our environment and vulgarized our lifestyle. No one says, “stop, look back, see what we’ve done,” because no one is in charge. As we seek more, we become less fulfilled and more impoverished.

Then there is the herd mentality within our human psyche that holds us to the idea the few will always take care of us, the many. The few are still trying but failing. For one, the few are caught up in the same mania; for another, they no longer are in charge.

Leadership exclusively in a leader is now a useless and irrelevant idea, and not working anymore.

That said there is little evidence leadership protocol has changed, only the efficacy of leadership continues to decline. Society is sick with the chronic illness of recidivism, stuck solving the same problems it has experienced before. Look at 2007 and you will see it is a mirror image of the 1970s.

This is so because the many, now a dominant professional class, don’t want the responsibility or accountability of leadership as they are programmed to being cared for and so cling to their comfort zone.

This is odd now that the majority of workers is professionally trained and possesses the efficacy of knowledge power. Professionals refuse to concede the leadership shift to them mainly because of their anachronistic programming, while management with its position power attempts to lead, denying its power has been lost.

The result is chaos, insanity and mayhem in the workplace where the body still lives but the spirit has died. Hope rides the precarious slope of trust that this, too, will pass without anything having to change at all. Could they be right?

Pitrim Sorokin suggests we are in a new phase of human history at the end of a 600-year-long Sensate day and entering a new glorious 600-year Ideational day. He is not alarmed with the dissonance, or the blatant greed, seeing it as evidence of the dying sensate.

Nearly seventy years ago he could see the iconography of the sacred being displaced by the pornography of the profane in art, music, literature, dress, language and behavior.

A crisis in identity would be revealed by people resorting to the ancient ritual of body painting (tattooing) to prove they exist; bring attention to themselves; and make a bold statement of an individuality they did not feel.

In the sensate period, he saw liberty as being “outer.” Ergo, outside authority was the first and compelling reference as society saw people forever as children needing to be stewarded throughout life for their own good.

In the ideational period, however, he sees liberty will be “inner.” The authority of self-responsibility and self-governance will come to the fore. Guidance will be from within rather than without. Self-reliance will be the byword.

In the sensate period, science and truth have been objective and cognitive based exclusively on the senses and empirical research. What cannot be objectively analyzed does not exist because it cannot be proved or disproved.

In the ideational period, science and truth will represent a synthesis of faith and the senses by reason. The intuitive side of human nature will be nurtured and come into its day.

In the sensate period, ethics has been based on the maximum happiness for the maximum number of human beings and has been pleasure driven.

In the ideational period, ethics will represent a synthesis of sensate (material) and ideational (spiritual) values in support of each other. The conquest of nature will pass into history as conservation and self-restraint will prevail at all levels.

Many scientists and social philosophers are already exploring ideational themes including the place of the supernatural in a material universe and the nature of the soul.

Clearly, we are in transition and moving so swiftly our minds are reluctant to grasp much less deal with this rupture with things as they have been.

Against this assumed shift, leaders are trying to lead; followers are looking for leaders; and both are frustrated as no one apparently wants to go with the flow. Buddha says, you cannot push the water. You cannot push people and society into the future that is governed by an eternal present, but you learn from it and flow with it.

We once had the “Divine Rights of Kings” in which kings were treated as if gods on earth. Monarchs vested themselves with the aura of majesty and ruled with impunity. They determined who lived and died, who prospered and who didn’t.

Centuries later, we have their stand ins: presidents, prime ministers, ayatollahs, dictators, CEOs, popes & bishops, educators and academics, pundits and soothsayers, celebrities & entertainers, and bosses of all descriptions. They have assumed the specter of power from that original heady source. We obliged them by giving them our power.

So, now in government, they control our freedom; in industry and commerce they control our jobs; in the church they control our hearts; in school they control our minds; in media they control our thinking, in leisure they control our time; and in work they control our security.

Liberty and the pursuit of happiness in this sensate day are outer, not inner, progressing from demand to reaction; obedience to submission; surrender to retreat, always avoiding conflict or standing our ground. But now it penalizes us all.

No one anticipated the rise of the professional class, or how it would become “the mad monarchs of the madhouse” (see Six Silent Killers, CRC Press 1998). Instead of assuming leadership roles, professionals have retreated into passive behaviors.

Were professionals operating at even 50 percent of their capability, few jobs would have left American shores. No third world nation could touch them with cheap labor because they would be a fire in the mind of enterprise. US intellectual capital is the superpower that is yet to be tapped.

A short fifty years ago, following WWII, the professional class was only ten percent of the workforce. Ninety percent were skilled and unskilled manual laborers. Today, the manual labor working class has nearly disappeared as professionals now dominate.

We are in the dawn of the information age with electronic connection changing the presentation of self in everyday life. But electronics didn’t spawn this class; war did. It was well in progress before iPods and iPhones, computers and the Internet were born. Several generations have had access to the G.I. Bill since WWII, which has seeded this new class. Now, the best minds are those of the knowledge workers.

Where are these minds? What are they about?

The evidence suggests they are operating around the edges of power while the center has become a collapsed vacuum occupied by pyramid structures and anachronistic leadership symbols. Enterprise is falling between the chairs.

It is counterintuitive to say we don’t need leaders; that everyone is a leader or no one is; that the healthiest republic is one in which everyone takes a leadership role.

True, we still have our CEOs, Boards of Directors, Executive Vice Presidents, Regional General Managers and Directors with layer on layer of management when the computer has erased much of their function; when a touch of a mouse can provide the information needed to make a timely decision. Like kings and emperors of the past, and ceremonial monarchs of today, hierarchical bureaucratic management remains a reference point of stubborn nostalgia as if an anchor in a storm. Stuck!

IF EVERYONE IS A LEADER, WHERE ARE THEY?

Is it impossible for postmodern society to grow up and grasp the possibilities of the emerging ideational culture? The answer lies in the question, time will tell. The same is true about the proposition that everyone will finally discovering they are leaders or no one is.

Events can provoke us to escape the cage of critical thinking and to think creatively outside the box. The “what” and “who” are germane to critical thinking; the “why” is to creative thinking.

Two years ago in August 2005 we experienced the catastrophic hurricane, Katrina that devastated the Gulf Coast of the United States, and completely destroyed the storied city of New Orleans.

The controversy still rages as media continue to stir the flames in the blame game. The fact that New Orleans is still not safe, according to Time magazine (August 13, 2007), lies with big-money politics, misguided policies and bureaucratic bungling, shoddy engineering and environmental ignorance.

The Louisiana governor, New Orleans mayor, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers didn’t do enough to prevent this terrible tragedy, or act decisively once it materialized.

We have been circling the wagons with this commentary for two years, stuck, seemingly unable to get beyond it to the “why” of the tragedy.

We all remember people waving towels at helicopters from atop their roofs, dead and dying bodies in the street unattended, or floating in rivers that were once streets. We also remember thousands of people camped in the coliseum and sports stadium without food or water, medical supplies or sufficient sanitation facilities to meet basic body needs. We also saw looters rampaging through the streets while police stood by, or abandoned their posts. We also saw television reporters making rating bonanzas never experienced before reporting the pathos while saying “we got here, why couldn’t aid workers?” It was pathetic to the point of the absurd in every sense of the word and from every perspective. There were no good guys here! It showed humanity naked and it wasn’t pretty from any aspect.

For the 72 hours before Katrina hit land, when it was still a category 4 hurricane, the Hurricane Weather Center in Miami repeated incessantly that Katrina could reach landfall as a category 3 hurricane, and if it did it would prove devastating to the Gulf Coast, particularly New Orleans.

It seems safe to assume that nearly 100 percent of the New Orleans population had access during that period to constant weather updates either from radio or television or both, as the message was repeated again and again and again, and yet people did not move. They were stuck.

The governor, the mayor, the police, the city council, the transportation authority and the leaders of industry and commerce, church and volunteer organizations were in direct contact with Hurricane Weather Central in Miami, or if not, certainly by radio or television with constant updates, and they did not move.

Collectively, as well as individually, they represent the leaderless leadership syndrome of our time. It is the pathology of normalcy. We are programmed to react to crises; to ignore warning signs until it is too late for retreat; to be emboldened with the idea should it come we will hunker down and show our mettle.

Nature has no ego and rules only with first principles. Nature does what it does because it can. Our survival, on the other hand, is predicated on acknowledging this and taking appropriate action.

A tornado, hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, volcano eruption, mudslide, flood, hail, wind or snowstorm often provides little warming. When it does, it is well to heed the meteorologist. Nature operates the same as it did millions of years ago, only then we didn’t crowd up the atmosphere. A hurricane has the power of several nuclear bombs and yet we chance it in a way we would not such manmade devices. We attempt to impose our will on Nature when she has no will at all.

The “who” and “what” of Katrina have been covered exhaustively, but the “why” avoided. We blame the president on down for the failure of government to respond to this national emergency. We blame the governor and mayor on down for failure to evacuate New Orleans, especially Ward Nine.

Many lost their lives and several thousand more had their lives disrupted because the levees didn’t hold when the category 3 hurricane hit.
Two hundred thousand people would leave New Orleans, not to return, or half the pre-Katrina population. The mind is fragile, and having survived a hurricane once, the mind is not quick to test fate twice. But “why” still bombards my conscience.

“Why” did 400,000 citizens of New Orleans who had constant radio and television weather reports updating them on the Katrina’s progress for a full 72 hours prior to its bombarding the levees remain stuck in place?

The answer is a profile of our American character. We are a passive people. We react to situations only on the advice of authority, not on the basis of our own good sense. We trust our leaders before we trust our instincts. We wait until it is too late, and then become complicit with media as victims and play the blame game, never getting around to blaming ourselves for the stupidity of our inaction. True, there were many that had no choice but to stay because of health reasons, lack of transportation, or insufficient funds. What about all the others? What about them?

We are more comfortable playing the victim than being seen as paranoid and impulsive. We are obsequious to authority, disinclined to take the initiative. If authority doesn’t tell us to leave, we wait. We listen to our radio, watch our television, listen to the director of the Hurricane Weather Center in Miami repeat for the nth time: In 72 hours a category 4 hurricane now in the Gulf of Mexico is heading for the southern coast of the United States, and if it hits, and it looks like it may reach landfall along the Louisiana-Mississippi coastline as a possible category 3, it could be devastating.

Those people listening to the radio, or watching their televisions were waiting for leaders to tell them what to do. They failed to perceive themselves as leaders. They failed to realize their first responsibility was to their own survival. They had three days! They did nothing.

They were dependent on a handful of people trained to lead, who were often right, but could be wrong. They had reduced themselves to the dependence programmed into them and scripted in their hard wiring. They had placed on hold the primordial intelligence of the animal that senses danger and moves with haste. This intelligence has saved man many times. Where was it when it was most needed?

In a terrible way, the people of New Orleans were complicit in their own devastation. This doesn’t exonerate others that failed in crises, but it is a less for us all.

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Dr. Fisher’s new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is available from the publisher, http://www.authorhouse.com/ or http://www.amazon.com/, or from your favorite bookstore.