DR. FISHER GOES TO SEA
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 31, 2007
"Thoughts lead on to purpose; purposes go forth in action; actions form habits; habits decide character; and character fixes our destiny."
Tryon Edwards (1809 - 1894), American theologian
* * * * * * * * * * *
As with all the other iterations of my career, I have shared my wondering, thinking and speculations in missives, articles and books on a host of topics, which might be of interest to you.
What I share with you now gives a sense of how serendipity plays in an ordinary life.
Like many others, I have ratcheted up the process, gradually, incrementally, and continuously in a persistent fashion over the past seventeen years, or since I retired from corporate life in 1990.
During that period, I have written nine books and hundreds of published articles, as well as hundreds of other unpublished articles on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com) and am now busily writing a tenth, which is to be a novel of South Africa during apartheid in the late 1960s.
"You can see from this production, Jim is a passionate writer," says Gary Herrity, a Clinton (Iowa) historian, and friend of mine in defining this persistence. I would prefer to be seen as an "idea guy" and peripatetic philosopher inclined to remind others of what is taken for granted, and therefore not seen at all. (Bernie, he said this recently at a dinner held while on a book tour to Iowa in September for my latest book.)
I've always been pretty focused and disciplined almost to a fault but best remembered by my generation as an athlete. What never seemed to register is that I was always more interested in academics than athletics almost from the beginning.
Writing has been a means of expression since a little boy. I know this to be a fact because my mother held on to things, and collected them in scrapbooks of virtually everything I did. These collections reveal a linear curve of curiosity and confluence into a mindset that in the evening of my life differs little with that long ago morning.
The latest confluence is the signing of a contract to give one or more cultural enrichment lectures on Oceania Cruises in 2008. It is the same cruise line that BB and I took this summer to the Baltic Sea, visiting old haunts as well as new ones such as Russia, Poland, and Estonia. It is a small ship (600 passengers) with the focus on enrichment rather than the typical entertainment ambiance of much larger cruise ships.
Consistent with the premise of this piece, I'm now going to share how that came about.
BB and I became friendly with the Park West Galleries art director of the cruise, attending all his art shows and auctions, and acquiring a couple pieces of original art. In the process, he asked what we did. BB told him she was an accountant and the business manager of a Jewish Day School, and I told him I wrote books.
"What kind of books do you write," he asked, a typical question of a writer. I told him, which spiked his interests.
"I'd sure like to read you." With that, I handed the only copy I brought of "A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD." He read it, and showed it to the cruise director, who met with me. I told him about my website, and he gave me information on the manager of entertainment, whom I wrote to when I got back to the States.
About two months later, this manager contacted me by email, and asked if I would be interested in being an enrichment lecturer. I emailed him back to send me some information on what that entailed.
What I received was an opportunity to give enrichment lecturers on the history and geography of the regions to be visited. I thought that closed the door on me.
Since I am neither a geographer nor historian, I wrote back, "Sorry, but this is beyond my expertise," stating what that was. He emailed again saying I could participate as a "special interest" lecturer. Still, not satisfied with that response, I sent him the following as to the content and context of possible lecturers based on my books.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Michael,
Before I go into possibilities, I want you to know I am interested. That said I would like to know your policy on selling books or even taking orders should people find they would like to read more of what I have to say.
RATIONALE FOR MY APPROACH
People are always interested in writers, how they become writers, where they get their material, how they first thought to become writers, what it takes to get published, and so on, mainly because everyone is in the communication business and secretly imagines they, too, could write and see their name in print with a book.
My approach as a wonderer and thinker is to translate my thoughts and ideas into books (nine to date) and articles (more than 300) accessible to everyone. I write out of my life, education, and experience.
My lectures would be built around my books:
· A Look Back to See Ahead: Our Chronic Culture Viewed from the 1970s (2007) -- how we are stuck in nostalgia repeating the same problems.
· Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1990) -- a book that predicted that entitlement programs would sink the Fortune 500, and they have. The book dared to go where others refused to tread, and has come to have classical significance.
· Confident Selling/Confident Thinking (1992) -- the seller is the barrier to success, not the buyer. Walls of resistance are self-created. It was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction 1992.
· The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain (1995) -- whatever the industry, professionals have become the majority of workers, but, unfortunately, they have not been programmed to recognize or deal with this successfully. So, they continue to complain rather than contribute when the only game in town belongs to them.
· The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (1996) -- to have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself. The emphasis of self-help books is on building self-esteem or becoming more assertive, when the problem is not with "others," but "you!" And the problem "with you," is that self-hatred vies with self-confidence and self-hatred usually wins. Self-help gurus and books spawn this disease, which nobody seems to notice.
Other possibilities are my novels:
· In the Shadow of the Courthouse: A Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel (2003) -- this is a snapshot of the middle of the twentieth century in the middle of the United States when the nation was at war (WWII). It was a time when problems were all about what we could do, collectively, to solve them. Now, problems are all about our precious egos and how we are being exploited. There was a period after the Great Depression and during WWII when people didn't have the luxury of being hedonistic or self-indulgent. Survival was the focus. Now, that sense of struggle and survival is long gone. In the Shadow is a nostalgic picture of what it was like when we had so little but were so much.
· Green Island in a Black Sea (now being written) -- this is a novel of South Africa apartheid based upon a time when the protagonist was there forming a new company of a British affiliate, South African chemical company, and his own company's subsidiary in the late 1968, when the US seemed to becoming apart at the seams, and he with her.
POSSIBLE THEMES
It has been my experience that the ordinary can prove exhilarating and extraordinary. With that in mind, here are some possible themes that could be built into special interest lectures:
(1) TRANSFORMATION (A Look Back to See Ahead: Our Chronic Culture Viewed from the 1970s)
The idea here is that we are stuck in transition from the "American Century" to the reemergence of Europe, and the incipient emergence of capitalistic China and India in the twenty-first century. This threatens our stability and lifestyle as we have come to know ourselves. It needn't be. Unfortunately, our institutions are atavistic and our problem solving methodologies (vertical thinking) have proven limiting, resulting in our national psyche being stuck, replicating, duplicating and repeating the same tired strategies and problems experienced decades ago only with different names and faces, but with little apparent sense of how this praises our folly.
(2) PIVOTAL SYNDROME OF SELF-CONFIDENCE &SELF-HATRED (The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend)
Too often the person we respect, trust and like least of all is ourselves. We explore the why of this here. Our orientation, for example, is to look for identity, authentication and approval from others who often disparage us in hopes of elevating themselves when it works always in reverse.
Pet themes are touched on including the charade of instant solutions such as "codependency no more," and "pulling your own strings" to illustrate how we have created the industry of self-help that seldom helps anyone but the generators of the material.
The importance of balance between essence (what we are born with) and personality (the many masks we wear in public) is exposed and illustrated for discussion.
(3) THE EMERGENCE OF THE PROFESSIONAL WORKER (Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches)
Quickly, it is shown how we have moved from an agrarian to an industrial to an electronic age, and how the first Quantum leap came when so many veterans of WWII took advantage of the GI Bill to acquire a college education. Their children (Baby Boomer Generation) followed their lead in massive numbers, so that today a college education has become routine.
The educated now are essentially craftsmen compared to the classical educated high school graduate of the early twentieth century. The latter would put to shame a college graduate today. Education today has become basically "trade school training" in preparation for a job, not preparation for life and how to deal with a changing world.
The second Quantum leap in this postmodern era has been the explosion in electronic technology so that the world has been reduced to a global community. Laptops and handheld devices can bridge thousands of miles in an instant, but it remains a bridge too far to make contact with ourselves between our two ears.
Unfortunately, institutional structures and organizational behavior lag in the midst of this rupture, creating the "United States of Anxiety," which has become an exported product to the rest of the world.
Since progressive societies across the globe copy our model, they are stuck in the same mud of our anachronistic practices, cutting and controlling until the lakes dry up, the air becomes a perfect storm, and everyone retreats into an artificial world to watch reality television.
Nobody knows how to lead and nobody wants to follow.
The answers were never less in Mahogany Row and more distributed throughout the organization because knowledge is now power and it is quite democratically distributed.
The problem is that like all transitions and transformations there is a natural resistance to change; only now the consequences of delay are more immediate.
(4) THE POWER OF NOVELS TO GET OUR ATTENTION (this is a possibility covering "In the Shadow of the Courthouse" and "Green Island in a Black Sea" that is now being written)
This enrichment lecture would take the audience through the power of awareness that certain novels can generate, none of course greater than Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
I am a writer in that vein as I show little forgiveness for our excesses. Instead, I attempt to show we only lose by dodging our problems, while scapegoats have a way of winning by default. You will note this in visiting my website: www.fisherofideas.com.
The Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk writes, "Above all else, a novel is a vessel that carries inside it a dream world we wish to keep, forever alive and forever ready. Novels are held together by the little pieces of daydreams that help us, from the moment we enter them, forget the tedious world we long to escape. The more we write, the richer these dreams become and the broader, more detailed, more complete seems that second world inside the vessel." I would agree.
Pamuk continues, "It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the ideas that govern the world in which we live; it is fiction that gives us access to the truths kept veiled by our families, our schools, and our society; it is the art of the novel that allows us to ask who we really are." It is why I have returned to this form.
I hope this helps in letting you know how I might fit into your enrichment lecture program. Let me know what you think. Again, my wife and I are fans of Oceania Cruises.
Be always well,
Jim
* * * * * * * * * * *
Michael wrote back that this menu was acceptable, but that I should downplay selling my books as the focus of my lectures might sound too much like infomercials. I agree.
Is this going to make me "rich"? No. It is going to give me free cruises where I sing for my supper, and visit interesting places. At the moment, I am contracting for only one cruise.
Not a bad deal as many of you know when it comes to how expensive these cruises can be. My only reservation is that it takes time away from my writing because the cruises last two weeks and then there is the time of preparation and travel to and from.
To give you a sense of my dilemma, I appear as if I am speaking off the cuff when I have put hours and hours into my preparation. It is the way I deal with my anxiety and the possibility of bombing, something of which I am familiar. I assure you it is not a happy experience. So, stay tuned.
_____________
Dr. Fisher's books mentioned here may be asked for at your favorite bookstore, are available on his website (www.fisherofideas.com), or other electronic sources such as www.amazon.com.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Thursday, October 25, 2007
MAKING A DIFFERENCE QUIETLY OUTSIDE THE LIMELIGHT!
MAKING A DIFFERENCE QUIETLY OUTSIDE THE LIMELIGHT
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2007
"Life's cares are comforts; such by heaven design'd; he that hath none must make them, or be wretched; cares are employments; and without employ the soul is on the rack; the rack of rest, to souls most adverse; action all their joy."
Edward Young (1623 - 1765), English poet
* * * * * * * * *
It is more than thirty-five years ago that I first met Dr. Blondel Senior. I was a mature graduate student at the University of South Florida pursuing a Ph.D. in organization-industrial psychology, after recently retiring from an international executive career in my mid-thirties. He was a professor at USF, and from that contact, has blossomed a lifelong friendship. We have consulted together, and eventually, when I went back into industry, joined each other as organizational development (OD) psychologists at Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida.
Behind that connection, there was and continued to be a personal dedication of which I was not aware. Dr. Senior was helping troubled young men find their way back to purpose, health and meaningful activity. His partner in this work was his wife Gloria, who is much accomplished in her own right, and if anything more quietly so than even her husband.
The synergy between them has literally moved mountains as they took an idea, developed it in its nascent form in the Orlando area, and then transplanted it to a majestic mountain retreat in Tennessee. There they started modestly and patiently nearly a score of years ago with a prescription of wisdom, love and dedication building a new community around the idea simply called the "Advent Home."
AD's singular objective then as now was to take troubled young men and reverse the ravages of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and restore their minds, bodies and character to health and well being so they could function successfully as contributing young adults to society.
Dr. Senior writes:
"ADHD is a neurological disorder affecting approximately 5 percent of American children. They are easily distracted, bored, depressed and have low concentration. Others are impulsive, hyperactive and have difficulty finishing tasks or remembering details."
He goes on to suggest, "I believe many children are actually misdiagnosed as having ADHD. Parents tell me about teachers who demand that disruptive students be suspended until a physician diagnoses them with ADHD and prescribes medication to keep them still. Some physicians willing comply."
Then Dr. Senior goes on to describe the nature of a typical student that comes to Advent Home:
"Many students arrive at Advent Home taking between 2 and 14 different medications. I recognize that medication can be beneficial, nevertheless, it is often overemphasized, and the effective use of natural remedies and lifestyle changes are not viewed with the respect they deserve. So, when these boys come to Advent Home, what is our approach?"
This is where Dr. Blondel and Gloria Senior take the path less chosen. They don't climb on the rhetoric platform, as I do, and insist that most chronic disorders are cultural and endemic to lifestyle excesses. They do something about it, quietly, unobtrusively and effectively.
The Seniors insist that the body and spirit are one; that so identified behavioral change, which at first blush might appear as miraculous, becomes the normal order of the day by taking careful steps away from cultural distractions towards the essence of being.
Now, how do they do that?
Advent Home's approach is to provide a minimum distracting environment, a regulated purposeful schedule of activities, daily chores, work assignments, recreation in the fresh air and sunshine, plus a healthy diet, all programmed to reduce the symptoms of ADHD and without the need for so much medication, so that the student is now alert and ready to appreciate and master a challenging academic curriculum.
Some students entering Advent Home stayed up late watching television, and were too tired to wake up early for school the next day. Others were bombarded with damaging distractions such as harmful music, movies, computer games, hobbies and inappropriate relationships, which contributed to ADHD-like symptoms, necessitating pharmaceutical therapeutic interventions.
Dr. Senior continues: "Anger and frequent outbursts in tired and over stimulated teens are often mislabeled as bipolar disorders. At Advent Home, we conduct group sessions where our students freely express their feelings and receive constructive feedback on numerous issues. Caring attention and affection from AH staff help cultivate a sense of 'home away from home.' As our boys feel more secure and learn to express their emotions, their anger subsides."
He is convinced that many of today's so-called ADHD symptoms are behaviors of "wasted minds and tired bodies." Dr. Senior's formula of healing agents such as work regularity, outdoor activity, sleep, and a minimum-distraction environment works. The evidence?
A recent survey of Advent Home parents by the E. A. Sutherland Education Association (EASEA) indicated high satisfaction with teachers and their methods:
· 92 percent agree students have access to a variety of learning resources.
· 88 percent believe students receive adequate help from school personnel.
· 92 percent agree that teachers are preparing students to continue education at more advanced levels.
· 96 percent believe teachers are help their children grow spiritually as well as physically and emotionally.
Dr. Senior's system of Maturation Therapy ® maintains a full academic curriculum through high school with modern classrooms, a complete library, science laboratory and computer training facilities.
The faculty and counselors are nearly two-to-one to the students with counselors living on campus. The student population is kept low -- somewhere in the high teens -- to ensure maximum connection and confluence.
The school is fully accredited and the teachers all certified, many with or in the process of earning advanced degrees. Students have gone on to excel at major American universities in professional pursuits including medicine, nursing, education and engineering.
Although Dr. Senior is the founder and director of the school along with his wife, Gloria, he once was a well-known international seminar leader and trainer in such areas as stress and time management. In a recent Advent Home Update, he availed the reader of a practical guide to time management. I would like to close with it as it summarizes what American psychologist William James called our "pragmatic philosophy." Here I am quoting as it appears in the latest Advent Home Update:
All of us have 24 hours each day, but too often it just isn't enough! We could all benefit from learning how to use the time we have more wisely. Here are seven suggestions on how to improve your personal effectiveness:
1. Make a list. Write down what you have to do. During the day, add or subtract from your list. Don't rely on memory, but use a notebook, planner or pocket calendar.
2. Set priorities. Priority "A" items must be done first. The "C" items can wait until the A's are completed. Avoid a "B" list, which means you can't make up your mind. Be decisive about each item.
3. Manger interruptions. You will be interrupted. Calls, visitors, crises, and other distractions will pressure you to change your priorities. Accept interruptions, but keep them short, give a good response, delegate, or add to your list.
4. Stay focused. If you get distracted, return to your plan as soon as possible. Learn to say no courteously. If you fee out of control, STOP. Rework your priority list and resume control.
5. Wisely conserve your energy. Know your limitations. Don't promise the impossible. Work smart. Avoid burnout, which results from unnecessary stress, anger, fear, poor diet, insufficient sleep, lack of exercise, and neglect of spirituality.
6. Cultivate a positive attitude. Your attitude drives you. Stay motivated by staying positive and in control. To take charge of your life; let go and let God!
7. Practice the four D's: When handling paper: dump it, delegate it, do it, delay it!
_______________
For your information: Advent Home Youth Services, Inc., 900 County Road 950, Calhoun, TN 37309-5150; website: www.adventhome.org; e-mail address; info@adventhome.org.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2007
"Life's cares are comforts; such by heaven design'd; he that hath none must make them, or be wretched; cares are employments; and without employ the soul is on the rack; the rack of rest, to souls most adverse; action all their joy."
Edward Young (1623 - 1765), English poet
* * * * * * * * *
It is more than thirty-five years ago that I first met Dr. Blondel Senior. I was a mature graduate student at the University of South Florida pursuing a Ph.D. in organization-industrial psychology, after recently retiring from an international executive career in my mid-thirties. He was a professor at USF, and from that contact, has blossomed a lifelong friendship. We have consulted together, and eventually, when I went back into industry, joined each other as organizational development (OD) psychologists at Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida.
Behind that connection, there was and continued to be a personal dedication of which I was not aware. Dr. Senior was helping troubled young men find their way back to purpose, health and meaningful activity. His partner in this work was his wife Gloria, who is much accomplished in her own right, and if anything more quietly so than even her husband.
The synergy between them has literally moved mountains as they took an idea, developed it in its nascent form in the Orlando area, and then transplanted it to a majestic mountain retreat in Tennessee. There they started modestly and patiently nearly a score of years ago with a prescription of wisdom, love and dedication building a new community around the idea simply called the "Advent Home."
AD's singular objective then as now was to take troubled young men and reverse the ravages of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and restore their minds, bodies and character to health and well being so they could function successfully as contributing young adults to society.
Dr. Senior writes:
"ADHD is a neurological disorder affecting approximately 5 percent of American children. They are easily distracted, bored, depressed and have low concentration. Others are impulsive, hyperactive and have difficulty finishing tasks or remembering details."
He goes on to suggest, "I believe many children are actually misdiagnosed as having ADHD. Parents tell me about teachers who demand that disruptive students be suspended until a physician diagnoses them with ADHD and prescribes medication to keep them still. Some physicians willing comply."
Then Dr. Senior goes on to describe the nature of a typical student that comes to Advent Home:
"Many students arrive at Advent Home taking between 2 and 14 different medications. I recognize that medication can be beneficial, nevertheless, it is often overemphasized, and the effective use of natural remedies and lifestyle changes are not viewed with the respect they deserve. So, when these boys come to Advent Home, what is our approach?"
This is where Dr. Blondel and Gloria Senior take the path less chosen. They don't climb on the rhetoric platform, as I do, and insist that most chronic disorders are cultural and endemic to lifestyle excesses. They do something about it, quietly, unobtrusively and effectively.
The Seniors insist that the body and spirit are one; that so identified behavioral change, which at first blush might appear as miraculous, becomes the normal order of the day by taking careful steps away from cultural distractions towards the essence of being.
Now, how do they do that?
Advent Home's approach is to provide a minimum distracting environment, a regulated purposeful schedule of activities, daily chores, work assignments, recreation in the fresh air and sunshine, plus a healthy diet, all programmed to reduce the symptoms of ADHD and without the need for so much medication, so that the student is now alert and ready to appreciate and master a challenging academic curriculum.
Some students entering Advent Home stayed up late watching television, and were too tired to wake up early for school the next day. Others were bombarded with damaging distractions such as harmful music, movies, computer games, hobbies and inappropriate relationships, which contributed to ADHD-like symptoms, necessitating pharmaceutical therapeutic interventions.
Dr. Senior continues: "Anger and frequent outbursts in tired and over stimulated teens are often mislabeled as bipolar disorders. At Advent Home, we conduct group sessions where our students freely express their feelings and receive constructive feedback on numerous issues. Caring attention and affection from AH staff help cultivate a sense of 'home away from home.' As our boys feel more secure and learn to express their emotions, their anger subsides."
He is convinced that many of today's so-called ADHD symptoms are behaviors of "wasted minds and tired bodies." Dr. Senior's formula of healing agents such as work regularity, outdoor activity, sleep, and a minimum-distraction environment works. The evidence?
A recent survey of Advent Home parents by the E. A. Sutherland Education Association (EASEA) indicated high satisfaction with teachers and their methods:
· 92 percent agree students have access to a variety of learning resources.
· 88 percent believe students receive adequate help from school personnel.
· 92 percent agree that teachers are preparing students to continue education at more advanced levels.
· 96 percent believe teachers are help their children grow spiritually as well as physically and emotionally.
Dr. Senior's system of Maturation Therapy ® maintains a full academic curriculum through high school with modern classrooms, a complete library, science laboratory and computer training facilities.
The faculty and counselors are nearly two-to-one to the students with counselors living on campus. The student population is kept low -- somewhere in the high teens -- to ensure maximum connection and confluence.
The school is fully accredited and the teachers all certified, many with or in the process of earning advanced degrees. Students have gone on to excel at major American universities in professional pursuits including medicine, nursing, education and engineering.
Although Dr. Senior is the founder and director of the school along with his wife, Gloria, he once was a well-known international seminar leader and trainer in such areas as stress and time management. In a recent Advent Home Update, he availed the reader of a practical guide to time management. I would like to close with it as it summarizes what American psychologist William James called our "pragmatic philosophy." Here I am quoting as it appears in the latest Advent Home Update:
All of us have 24 hours each day, but too often it just isn't enough! We could all benefit from learning how to use the time we have more wisely. Here are seven suggestions on how to improve your personal effectiveness:
1. Make a list. Write down what you have to do. During the day, add or subtract from your list. Don't rely on memory, but use a notebook, planner or pocket calendar.
2. Set priorities. Priority "A" items must be done first. The "C" items can wait until the A's are completed. Avoid a "B" list, which means you can't make up your mind. Be decisive about each item.
3. Manger interruptions. You will be interrupted. Calls, visitors, crises, and other distractions will pressure you to change your priorities. Accept interruptions, but keep them short, give a good response, delegate, or add to your list.
4. Stay focused. If you get distracted, return to your plan as soon as possible. Learn to say no courteously. If you fee out of control, STOP. Rework your priority list and resume control.
5. Wisely conserve your energy. Know your limitations. Don't promise the impossible. Work smart. Avoid burnout, which results from unnecessary stress, anger, fear, poor diet, insufficient sleep, lack of exercise, and neglect of spirituality.
6. Cultivate a positive attitude. Your attitude drives you. Stay motivated by staying positive and in control. To take charge of your life; let go and let God!
7. Practice the four D's: When handling paper: dump it, delegate it, do it, delay it!
_______________
For your information: Advent Home Youth Services, Inc., 900 County Road 950, Calhoun, TN 37309-5150; website: www.adventhome.org; e-mail address; info@adventhome.org.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
ATTENTION! CLUES TO THE FUTURE IN THIS QUADRENNIAL MADNESS
ATTENTION: CLUES TO THE FUTURE IN THIS QUADRENNIAL MADNESS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 23, 2007
"The future is going to belong to young people and your people have to take command of their voice."
Robert Redford, American film actor
* * * * * * * * *
Often I have felt like the lone fellow standing in the middle of the corporate stadium shouting it is about to implode, only to hear my echo.
All the indicators are there that institutional corpocracy is faltering badly if not folding.
I've observed corporate society -- in the private and public sector -- from outside as an unobtrusive observer and consultant.
For forty years as an organization-industrial psychologist I have seen the human folly of it all with attempts to deal with it increasingly only in faint-hearted ways.
There are no longer believers on the corporate campus, only performers, and when believers don't have their hearts in it, their heads lag behind. This is true from the privileged few who run things to the pampered many who are indulged by them in an attempt either to placate or control.
I see management is no longer necessary; that it is a vestige organ on the corporate body of a societal past; that leadership is not working because cultural programming has reduced and isolated leadership to a few key individuals, when this model no longer tracks with efficacy or reality.
With closer observation of corporate society, we see the wildness, the panic, the incredible blundering that has become the pathology of normalcy.
This pathology is quite transparent in government, but equally apparent in corporate America, which has become one continuous strip mall. Everyone that works in a corporate setting knows this to be true, but no one does anything about it.
People are afraid. They have jobs to protect and careers to sustain. So, it is easier to go with the flow until the source dries up. But that, of course, is not their problem!
That is my perspective from outside looking in.
Writers within the system, whose beat is to get up close and personal, see the growing impact of the nerd complex, what Michael Kinsley of Time (October 29, 2007) calls "libertarians rising." He writes, as everyone seems to be writing, about the quadrennial madness of people who want to be president while their respective choirs are on holiday.
Candidates are entertaining each other on the stump talking about everything but ideas. There are no Lincoln-Douglas debaters here; nor any consideration of such ideas as Kinsley's about the transformation going on under their eyes of the changing social-political climate of the 24 to 35-year-olds. Instead, it is an AARP convention on the road to no place or utopia.
These talking heads groan on about nothing of consequence lest it come back to bite them. They have concluded voters care more about how a candidate makes them feel about themselves or how he or she looks on TV. It is a beauty contest that has little to do with addressing real issues to real people and making connection, when newly eligible voters are lost somewhere in cyberspace.
Kinsley sees the same behavioral shift that I do only from the inside out rather than outside in. Bosses and formal structures, policies & procedures won't cut it with the rising libertarians springing up from nerdsville. They are full of ideas, energy and a desire to make a difference but won't surrender to claptrap or marching orders. It is a new day.
Meanwhile, approximately a $ billion will be spent during this primary season with all these candidates making presidential when they don't seem to understand that being presidential no longer matters. Being relevant does. Then again, they need all this money for television advertisement because this voting block of the future isn't watching.
These candidates don't seem to get it. This generation that has arrived doesn't believe it needs them; doesn't believe in them; doesn't trust them -- any of them in either party. To members of the computer revolution this is a meaningless sideshow that if they watch it at all, it is for comic relief.
As Kinsley says, "The computer revolution has bred a generation of smart loners convinced they don't need society -- nor should anyone else."
Is anyone listening?
This is not an aberration. Kinsley sees this generation becoming an increasingly powerful force in politics. It has already shredded the corporation and is doing pretty much as it pleases.
Corporations making hey while the sun is shinning are not acting very corporate at all -- take Apple, Inc. for example -- as they turn this creative force loose to do its thing within reasonable parameters without an army in the night of managers to play critical or nurturing parent to them.
We don't fully understand where these libertarians are going, or how they will restructure work and social life in this new millennium but we can already see that many of the alarm signals covered in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD have surfaced as they dance naked in the mind field.
___________
Dr. Fisher's newest book is "A Look Back to See Ahead" (AuthorHouse 2007).
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 23, 2007
"The future is going to belong to young people and your people have to take command of their voice."
Robert Redford, American film actor
* * * * * * * * *
Often I have felt like the lone fellow standing in the middle of the corporate stadium shouting it is about to implode, only to hear my echo.
All the indicators are there that institutional corpocracy is faltering badly if not folding.
I've observed corporate society -- in the private and public sector -- from outside as an unobtrusive observer and consultant.
For forty years as an organization-industrial psychologist I have seen the human folly of it all with attempts to deal with it increasingly only in faint-hearted ways.
There are no longer believers on the corporate campus, only performers, and when believers don't have their hearts in it, their heads lag behind. This is true from the privileged few who run things to the pampered many who are indulged by them in an attempt either to placate or control.
I see management is no longer necessary; that it is a vestige organ on the corporate body of a societal past; that leadership is not working because cultural programming has reduced and isolated leadership to a few key individuals, when this model no longer tracks with efficacy or reality.
With closer observation of corporate society, we see the wildness, the panic, the incredible blundering that has become the pathology of normalcy.
This pathology is quite transparent in government, but equally apparent in corporate America, which has become one continuous strip mall. Everyone that works in a corporate setting knows this to be true, but no one does anything about it.
People are afraid. They have jobs to protect and careers to sustain. So, it is easier to go with the flow until the source dries up. But that, of course, is not their problem!
That is my perspective from outside looking in.
Writers within the system, whose beat is to get up close and personal, see the growing impact of the nerd complex, what Michael Kinsley of Time (October 29, 2007) calls "libertarians rising." He writes, as everyone seems to be writing, about the quadrennial madness of people who want to be president while their respective choirs are on holiday.
Candidates are entertaining each other on the stump talking about everything but ideas. There are no Lincoln-Douglas debaters here; nor any consideration of such ideas as Kinsley's about the transformation going on under their eyes of the changing social-political climate of the 24 to 35-year-olds. Instead, it is an AARP convention on the road to no place or utopia.
These talking heads groan on about nothing of consequence lest it come back to bite them. They have concluded voters care more about how a candidate makes them feel about themselves or how he or she looks on TV. It is a beauty contest that has little to do with addressing real issues to real people and making connection, when newly eligible voters are lost somewhere in cyberspace.
Kinsley sees the same behavioral shift that I do only from the inside out rather than outside in. Bosses and formal structures, policies & procedures won't cut it with the rising libertarians springing up from nerdsville. They are full of ideas, energy and a desire to make a difference but won't surrender to claptrap or marching orders. It is a new day.
Meanwhile, approximately a $ billion will be spent during this primary season with all these candidates making presidential when they don't seem to understand that being presidential no longer matters. Being relevant does. Then again, they need all this money for television advertisement because this voting block of the future isn't watching.
These candidates don't seem to get it. This generation that has arrived doesn't believe it needs them; doesn't believe in them; doesn't trust them -- any of them in either party. To members of the computer revolution this is a meaningless sideshow that if they watch it at all, it is for comic relief.
As Kinsley says, "The computer revolution has bred a generation of smart loners convinced they don't need society -- nor should anyone else."
Is anyone listening?
This is not an aberration. Kinsley sees this generation becoming an increasingly powerful force in politics. It has already shredded the corporation and is doing pretty much as it pleases.
Corporations making hey while the sun is shinning are not acting very corporate at all -- take Apple, Inc. for example -- as they turn this creative force loose to do its thing within reasonable parameters without an army in the night of managers to play critical or nurturing parent to them.
We don't fully understand where these libertarians are going, or how they will restructure work and social life in this new millennium but we can already see that many of the alarm signals covered in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD have surfaced as they dance naked in the mind field.
___________
Dr. Fisher's newest book is "A Look Back to See Ahead" (AuthorHouse 2007).
Monday, October 22, 2007
FRAGMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY -- "Wake up, little Susie, wake up!"
FYI:
I'm working on my novel. As respites from it, I'm writing "fragments of a philosophy" similar to those that appeared in "A Look Back to See Ahead." Who knows, such reflections might find their way into the novel. Stay tuned.
JRF
FRAGMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY
"WAKE UP, LITTLE SUSIE, WAKE UP!"
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2007
"PROGRESS IS OUR MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT!"-- Slogan of General Electric in the 1960s
Ever notice how we are obsessed with endings? It is an interesting obsession because we clearly don't believe in endings, or beginnings or middles for that matter. But to camouflage this obsession we insist on making known the purpose of a thing, when clearly most things are purposeless, while locked in purposefulness. We wrap our lives in projects.
The project?
Oh, that can be anything that looks, seems, smells, tastes, and feels good like what is already accepted as "in" or "desirable" or consistent with whatever everyone else is doing or is. Education can't simply be a desire to enlarge our horizons to better enjoy our time on earth. It must have a purpose: to make a living, to do good, to make a name for ourselves, to leave the world a better place for our being here when being here never gets much attention. We are so busy doing and becoming that we don't have enough time to be. Being is not part of the equation.
This is true in work and what is deemed productive effort, or the dynamics of an economy. It is equally true of what is called pleasure or affluence or, alas, purpose. Words become a substitute for action, and forward inertia a substitute for movement. We must escape into some artificial high to find ourselves by losing ourselves. We create diseases by lifestyle choices, and then cure the diseases by artificial or synthetic palliatives. The more things change the more they remain the same.
We fail to see the paradox in promoting health insurance for everyone while neglecting to promote healthful lifestyles. More sensible lifestyles would negate the need for a national health insurance program. It is such little things that mean a lot that we as a peculiar clueless animal repeatedly miss.
There is no originality when the focus is moving away rather than towards a thing. It is the difference between centrifugal and centripetal force. There is something of the "big bang" and "black holes" to this, which I will address in a future missive.
Whatever the activity, it is raw and naked and yes, obscenely so, when it comes to art. We let our subconscious show in art to reveal our confusion while wrapping it in the allure of an extension of what is construed as beautiful, sophisticated, and the touchstone of culture.
Come to think of it music and painting and other expressions of creativity are all about progress, aren't they?
They mask the most prominent condition of our times, the disorder of attention deficit. We can't stand still. We constantly have to be on the move, talking to someone, listening or texting someone. We are slaves to our electronic toys. Show people some new gadget, or show them the old gadget in a new way and they are hooked.
We've left the fresh air and smell of mature and the need to work from sun up to sunset to make chump change, for urban sprawl. We still want the feel of the real without the smell or aggravation. Now we have street art in metropolitan America where ceramic pigs and cows in colorful polka-dot acrylic splendor grace the boulevard of the high-end shops. Not to be outdone, plastinated real dead animals are on display in art galleries and homes of affluent sportsmen.
What this reveals is our sickness, the shadows of our collective mind, the anxieties of our times juxtaposed in point-counterpoint to expose the sarcophagus of "the project." Wake up little, Susie, wake up!
Nobody creates anymore. Look to popular music. It is primarily noise, a lot of gyrations, bastardizing the language, and staying well within the limits of gonad consciousness. Painters don't paint anymore. Daubing canvases with streaks of colors place us back in the ancient caves of primitives who were afraid to come out for fear of being the lunch of some wild animal.
The fear now is not of wild animals but of intimacy. We don't want to know ourselves. When others find out who we are, and they don't like it, they do one of two things: they attempt to change us, or they abandon us. We do the same things to ourselves and with our projects.
When they don't work out or work as they are supposed to within the time constraints that we artificially impose, we panic. We become stressed out.
Mild forms of stress - overworking a problem at work or at home compounds the impact - induce physical reaction to make us stop. We have a pain behind the eyes or in a knee or in some other part of our anatomy that forces us to do so. Extreme forms of stress release the same atavistic mechanism known as "fight or flight" - that burst of energy, which will give us the strength to confront the problem and our adversary or cause us to retreat into ourselves, and say, "no big deal," and suffer the mounting stress for the denial.
We are no longer in the wild, but our urban jungle induces the same reaction. The combined pressure of a heavy workload with distressing details and no clear closure, the death of a parent, the divorce from a mate, the plunge into chaos from a natural disaster, can trigger a permanent adrenalin rush. Blood pressure goes up, weight goes down, and appetite is suppressed. The brain speeds up. Sleep becomes evasive, sex impossible. The body reacts as if the mind has encountered something to be feared. There is sweating, anxiety, rising to panic, followed by memory loss, and obsessive circular thinking as if on a treadmill spinning away and going nowhere in a cage.
We are not operating in a sacred world of high purpose. We are operating in a market economy. Progress is our most important product. Here we are aiming at some high truth, when in fact we are mired in the mud of commerce.
One of a continuing series from Dr. Fisher, whose most recent book is A Look Back to See Ahead (2007).
I'm working on my novel. As respites from it, I'm writing "fragments of a philosophy" similar to those that appeared in "A Look Back to See Ahead." Who knows, such reflections might find their way into the novel. Stay tuned.
JRF
FRAGMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY
"WAKE UP, LITTLE SUSIE, WAKE UP!"
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2007
"PROGRESS IS OUR MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT!"-- Slogan of General Electric in the 1960s
Ever notice how we are obsessed with endings? It is an interesting obsession because we clearly don't believe in endings, or beginnings or middles for that matter. But to camouflage this obsession we insist on making known the purpose of a thing, when clearly most things are purposeless, while locked in purposefulness. We wrap our lives in projects.
The project?
Oh, that can be anything that looks, seems, smells, tastes, and feels good like what is already accepted as "in" or "desirable" or consistent with whatever everyone else is doing or is. Education can't simply be a desire to enlarge our horizons to better enjoy our time on earth. It must have a purpose: to make a living, to do good, to make a name for ourselves, to leave the world a better place for our being here when being here never gets much attention. We are so busy doing and becoming that we don't have enough time to be. Being is not part of the equation.
This is true in work and what is deemed productive effort, or the dynamics of an economy. It is equally true of what is called pleasure or affluence or, alas, purpose. Words become a substitute for action, and forward inertia a substitute for movement. We must escape into some artificial high to find ourselves by losing ourselves. We create diseases by lifestyle choices, and then cure the diseases by artificial or synthetic palliatives. The more things change the more they remain the same.
We fail to see the paradox in promoting health insurance for everyone while neglecting to promote healthful lifestyles. More sensible lifestyles would negate the need for a national health insurance program. It is such little things that mean a lot that we as a peculiar clueless animal repeatedly miss.
There is no originality when the focus is moving away rather than towards a thing. It is the difference between centrifugal and centripetal force. There is something of the "big bang" and "black holes" to this, which I will address in a future missive.
Whatever the activity, it is raw and naked and yes, obscenely so, when it comes to art. We let our subconscious show in art to reveal our confusion while wrapping it in the allure of an extension of what is construed as beautiful, sophisticated, and the touchstone of culture.
Come to think of it music and painting and other expressions of creativity are all about progress, aren't they?
They mask the most prominent condition of our times, the disorder of attention deficit. We can't stand still. We constantly have to be on the move, talking to someone, listening or texting someone. We are slaves to our electronic toys. Show people some new gadget, or show them the old gadget in a new way and they are hooked.
We've left the fresh air and smell of mature and the need to work from sun up to sunset to make chump change, for urban sprawl. We still want the feel of the real without the smell or aggravation. Now we have street art in metropolitan America where ceramic pigs and cows in colorful polka-dot acrylic splendor grace the boulevard of the high-end shops. Not to be outdone, plastinated real dead animals are on display in art galleries and homes of affluent sportsmen.
What this reveals is our sickness, the shadows of our collective mind, the anxieties of our times juxtaposed in point-counterpoint to expose the sarcophagus of "the project." Wake up little, Susie, wake up!
Nobody creates anymore. Look to popular music. It is primarily noise, a lot of gyrations, bastardizing the language, and staying well within the limits of gonad consciousness. Painters don't paint anymore. Daubing canvases with streaks of colors place us back in the ancient caves of primitives who were afraid to come out for fear of being the lunch of some wild animal.
The fear now is not of wild animals but of intimacy. We don't want to know ourselves. When others find out who we are, and they don't like it, they do one of two things: they attempt to change us, or they abandon us. We do the same things to ourselves and with our projects.
When they don't work out or work as they are supposed to within the time constraints that we artificially impose, we panic. We become stressed out.
Mild forms of stress - overworking a problem at work or at home compounds the impact - induce physical reaction to make us stop. We have a pain behind the eyes or in a knee or in some other part of our anatomy that forces us to do so. Extreme forms of stress release the same atavistic mechanism known as "fight or flight" - that burst of energy, which will give us the strength to confront the problem and our adversary or cause us to retreat into ourselves, and say, "no big deal," and suffer the mounting stress for the denial.
We are no longer in the wild, but our urban jungle induces the same reaction. The combined pressure of a heavy workload with distressing details and no clear closure, the death of a parent, the divorce from a mate, the plunge into chaos from a natural disaster, can trigger a permanent adrenalin rush. Blood pressure goes up, weight goes down, and appetite is suppressed. The brain speeds up. Sleep becomes evasive, sex impossible. The body reacts as if the mind has encountered something to be feared. There is sweating, anxiety, rising to panic, followed by memory loss, and obsessive circular thinking as if on a treadmill spinning away and going nowhere in a cage.
We are not operating in a sacred world of high purpose. We are operating in a market economy. Progress is our most important product. Here we are aiming at some high truth, when in fact we are mired in the mud of commerce.
One of a continuing series from Dr. Fisher, whose most recent book is A Look Back to See Ahead (2007).
Saturday, October 20, 2007
IS THERE A LITTLE "FAUST" IN YOU?
IS THERE A LITTLE "FAUST" IN YOU?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2007
"Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Christopher Marlowe, The Tragic History of Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (1592)
"Faustian: of, relating to, resembling, or suggesting Faust; made or done for present gain without regard for future cost or consequences."
Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (1993)
* * * * * * * * *
These are the immortal lines when the devil introduces Faustus to Helen of Troy.
As with most morality plays, there is a basis in fact. Dr. Johannes Faust was a real person. He was a professional astrologer and magician who spent his time wandering from town to town in Germany during the sixteenth century. He provided horoscopes and astrological advice to bishops and princes as well as to commoners. He was famous enough to come to the attention of Martin Luther who denounced him as making a pact with the devil.
Faust's actual acquaintance with the devil is not known, but he did become a legend after his death, when an account of his life was published in Germany. It incorporated many fanciful tales borrowed from other sources. In fact down through the ages, fascination is yet to diminish. It has become the Faustian myth.
What has kept this alive is there appears a drive in man to attain an edge on his fellowman. It breaks out in mysterious ways. So, it should come as no surprise that artists would place their stamp on the myth profiling extraordinary souls.
What of ordinary souls such as you and I? Does Faust touch our lives?
Before you answer, consider the fact that many of us seek knowledge and wealth and power and influence, or some other kind of dominance, at the expense of our own personal material-spiritual balance. We become essentially one-dimensional as Herbert Marcuse suggests in his book "One Dimensional Man" (1986). We fail to see something is given up never to be regained for a temporary advantage.
There has been dissembling in science where objective truth is supposedly the anchor of the investigation. But the good and bad angel is very much in the midst of humans. I was reminded of this again when James Watson, the scientific icon and "co-discoverer" of DNA said recently that blacks are inherently inferior to whites and therefore the prospects for Africa are not good.
Watson in the chemical field was a model builder. His partner Francis Crick was a theoretical chemist. They were totally off base until the boss of Rosalind Franklin showed them her famous "photograph 51," which confirmed DNA was a double helix.
Watson savaged Franklin in his book "The Double Helix" (1968) without acknowledging her contribution. She died from excessive exposure to radiation in her research in 1958, four years before the Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1962) was awarded to Watson and Crick. Franklin was thirty-eight (see "Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA" by Brenda Maddox 2002) when she died.
Watson was very Faustian as a young man. He brazenly invited himself from the States to participate on the British team in Great Britain, which would eventually find him a scientific iconic figure. The dark side of his mind slipped out only this week with an opinion that has no basis in science. Once it was published in the press he was immediately suspended from chancellor responsibilities at the renowned Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (source: The Tampa Tribune, October 19, 2007).
It might even be suggested that the maddening race to understand the universe, or make progress our most important product is symptomatic of this Faustian myth. For such people in quest of such a “prize” nothing must stand in the way. This includes brutalizing those less motivated or driven. Indeed, such people think they are different, exceptional, unique, as if they, alone, can hold the bad angel at bay and have only the blessings of the good angel.
What is prejudice but shorthand for claiming superiority? What is the obsession with living in an affluent gated community or graduating from an exclusive university other than to create an edge? What is the obsession with knowledge, celebrity, beauty, sex, or physical prowess than Faustian?
Now, this doesn't have to be the motivation but our cultural programming surely encourages such preoccupation. We live in a sick Faustian society as indexed by disproportionate wealth where people are allowed to die every five seconds because of a simple lack of food and water. Someone says, "You're talking about Africa. This is the United States. This is not Africa."
Well, we talk about a competitive edge and competitive advantage as if they are the lexicon for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, when in truth for every gain someone else loses. The irony is that to create this edge we often stifle creativity, encourage conformity and replicate mediocrity, grinding our obsession deeper into the abyss while promoting lifestyle diseases as companion to such excess.
Many fortunes have been built on Faustian excess, as we learn if we read biographies. Read the biography of Henry Ford. His good angel found him giving workers the $5 a day wage, a pension plan, and the eight-hour working day so that he had a ready market for his Model-A and Model-T Ford, while his bad angel had him surreptitiously supporting Hitler and having an equal hatred of the Jews.
How do you know that Faust controls your nature? There is no simple answer, only ambivalent gradients of obsessive compulsiveness. Some simple questions might help: are you in control of your destiny or is your destiny in control of you? Do you have balance in your life or are you sacrificing balance now for finding it later? Are you too self-absorb to have time for family and friends? Can you never relax?
Another good indicator is when beauty or intellectual or physical prowess is flaunted and not used with modesty and humility; when self-aggrandizement becomes an end; when society becomes unequivocally narcissistic. Then the pathology of normalcy is firmly in place. I suggest it is and that we live in a sick society.
Unfortunately, the last chapter on Faust has not been written, as it lives in the heart of every ambitious person who sells his soul to attain "the prize," whatever it is. Then, it becomes pathological and eats away at the spiritual-material balance of goodness displaying itself instead in Faustian diabolical form.
The killing fields across the globe are not always those of physical murder. More often than not the killing fields are emotional and psychological abuse. The body is allowed to live but the spirit is murdered as we escape into work, career, drugs or dissipation.
It is my thesis that we promote Faustian behavior without ever mentioning the name. It is the reason suicide is the greatest killer of our young people. Not only is suicide rampant in the United States, but across the Western world, and is starting to be noted in China and India as well.
That said it might be interesting to review a few well-known Faustian myths that artists have provided us starting with the most well known from the gifted Christopher Marlowe, who never made it to the age of thirty. He was fatally wounded in a brawl at Deptford, England May 30, 1593.
Marlowe's own life was quite Faustian. His original intention was to take Holy Orders and become a priest, but he abandoned that to write plays and to become embroiled in political intrigue.
In 1589 he was involved in a scuffle with William Bradley in Norton Folgate, who died, but Marlowe’s plea of self-defense was accepted. A genius as a playwright, he was also known to have strong unorthodox religious and political opinions and would not back down from a fight. It was as if he felt immortal. In 1593, he was arrested on a charge of atheism, but met his own death before being brought to trial.
Intrigue has followed his death for more than four hundred years. The whole episode of his death is perplexing as some say he was a spy, and others say he escaped to the continent and wrote the plays for which Shakespeare is given credit.
Rodney Bolt writes in "History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe" (2005) that he staged his own death to dodge the atheism charge, fled to Europe, and wrote the great Shakespearean plays. The evidence? The language and syntax of Marlowe's "Tamburlaine" (1586 - 1587), "The Jew of Malta" (1589), and "Edward the Second" (1591).
The Faustian mind loves the idea of conspiracy. Critics insist, however, that Marlowe's plays up to 1590 are tragedies, but unlike Shakespeare's tragedies, show no real tragic sense and little skill in dramatic contrivance.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564 - 1593)
Marlowe's "The Tragedy of Dr. Faustus" (1592) is "master of all knowledge." The story as told by Marlowe finds Faustus born of base stock in Rhodes, Germany. In his maturity, while living with relatives in Wittenberg, he studies theology and is called "doctor." However, Faustus is so swollen with conceit that, like Joyce's Daedalus, strives too far, becoming glutted with learning and conspires with the devil to know everything knowable, and finally falls accursed.
The path of his downfall found him the complete master of medicine, where he had huge success. But after obtaining good health for men no challenge remained in medicine except immortality. Law was no challenge as he sensed that it was nothing but an elaborate moneymaking scheme. Only divinity remained, but it was a blind alley. Since the reward of sin was death, and since no one could escape sin, all men must die.
The Good Angel and Evil Angel tried to persuade Faustus, but he was in no mood to listen to the Good Angel. He sought to be the wealthiest man on earth with all the power that comes from such wealth. He would reform education and perform many other fabulous deeds.
His first act of magic is to summon Mephostopilis, but he is so ugly he orders him to assume the shape of a Franciscan friar. Faustus questions Mephostopilis about the nature of his master, Lucifer and Lucifer's domain, hell. Mephostopilis tells him that the fallen spirits, having been deprived of the glories of heaven, find the whole world hell.
Faustus then says he will surrender his soul to Lucifer if the fallen angel will give him twenty-four years of voluptuous ease. Lucifer agrees. Faustus thinks he has beaten the devil at his own game because he doesn’t believe in the afterlife.
During the final days of his life, Faustus asked Mephostopilis to bring him Helen of Troy as a lover. In the end, he pleads to be spared impending misery, but instead is carried off by a company of devils.
JOHANN WOLFGANG von GOETHE (1749 - 1832)
The genius of Goethe rendered a version of this great story in a clarity that still resonates with each generation throughout the world. To Goethe, the hero is simply "Faust" (1790) but the philosophical problem is the same: the human damnation through the desire for knowledge.
Echoing the sentiments of the eighteenth century "Age of Reason," which asserted that man's rationality was the supreme truth in life, Goethe created some of the most quoted passages in literature.
Then, too, Faust's cry for one moment in life of uninterrupted pleasure is echoed throughout the ages in the emotions of men of all times. Goethe cleverly creates a play of "Faust" that doesn't exist in a certain locale or time, but exists forever and everywhere.
While three archangels are singing the praises of God's lofty works, Mephistopheles appears and says that conditions on earth are bad. The Lord agrees that man has his weaknesses, but He slyly points out that His servant Faust cannot be swayed from the path of righteousness.
Mephistopheles makes a wager with the Lord that Faust can be tempted from his faithful service. The Lord knew Faust could be led downward if he were to lose his soul, while Mephistopheles knew Faust was not satisfied with all the knowledge he had acquired.
Faust confesses to his servant, Wagner, that he has two souls: one clings to earthly things, the other to super sensual things. Feeling limited in his daily existence, and wanting to be taken to another level, Faust intimates to Wagner that he would do anything to take him there.
Mephistopheles in the form of a dog follows Faust to his home. Seeing Faust contemplating the meaning of life, the dog steps forward in its true form, but Faust remains unmoved by the devil's entreaties.
The devil returns the next day and finds Faust more receptive to getting more out of life. But again Mephistopheles fails to tempt Faust with cheap debauchery.
Next the devil uses the maiden Gretchen to tempt Faust. A complicated love affair follows in which Gretchen surrenders to Faust, than is shamed by her brother, who Faust kills, only for Gretchen to kill her love child with Faust and damn herself.
Mephistopheles then brings Faust to the emperor, who asks Faust to show him the most beautiful male and female who have ever existed. Faust produces the images of Paris and Helen of Troy. Then to the devil's surprise, Faust faints. He is so overwhelmed with desire at the sight of Helen. This desire for ideal love mystifies the devil.
Mephistopheles with the help of Wagner creates a formless spirit of learning, Homunculus, who can see what is going on in Faust's mind. With that, they venture off to Greece. There a living Helen is brought to Faust with the devil now convinced he has finally found Faust's weakness. But Faust soon realizes that the enjoyment of transitory beauty is no more enduring than his other experiences.
With this new knowledge of himself, Faust returns to his native land with a pledge to use his powers in the service of men. His mystical power now banished, he stands before nature alone. His first act is to turn a large swamp into useful production. People are inspired by this act and follow by widening their creative efforts in useful ways.
Now blind and old, Faust sees his life among men as free and active and useful. At that moment, when he realizes what he has created, he cries out for this moment, so fair to him, to linger on.
Faust had emerged from being a self-centered egoist into a man who saw his actions as part of a creative society. He realized, finally, life could be worth living, but in that moment of perception he lost his wager to Mephistopheles. The devil now claims Faust's soul, but in reality he too has lost the wager. The Almighty was right. Although Faust has made a mistake in his life, he has always remained aware of goodness and truth.
Seeing his own defeat, Mephistopheles attempts to prevent the ascension of Faust's soul to God. Angels appear to help Faust, however, and he is carried into Heaven where all is active creation, exactly the kind of afterlife Faust would have chosen.
OSCAR WILDE (1856 - 1900)
"The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1891) remains a popular book over a hundred years after its first publication. Dorian Gray is very much a Faustian young man, as was the author himself, who lived an amoral life and died a young man of genius at the age of forty-four while burning the candle at both ends.
The story opens with Basil Hallward, an artist, putting the finishing touches on the portrait of his handsome young friend, Dorian Gray. Lord Henry Wotton, a caller, indolently watches the painter at work. The artist explains to Lord Henry that Dorian was his ideal of youth, and that he must promise not to influence the boy, as the artist knew Lord Henry was the personification of evil.
While the two men are talking, Dorian comes to the studio. Lord Henry immediately attempts to influence Dorian, telling him that while he will become old, wrinkled and ugly, his portrait will remain the same, frozen in beauty. This saddens Dorian and wishes that the portrait would grow old while he remains forever young. Lord Henry sees that he gets his wish becoming his Mephistopheles.
Dorian then romances a young actress, Sibyl Vane. When she is hopelessly in love with him, he coldly rejects her. She commits suicide as Dorian has killed her love. He learns of her suicide too late to ask her forgiveness, and decides, immediately, to live a life of sensation and pleasure.
One day he notices that the appearance of his portrait has changed but he has not. He hangs the portrait in an old schoolroom upstairs, locks the door, and puts the key where only he can find it.
On the eve of his thirty-eighth birthday, he takes the artist to the portrait to show what it has become. It was now quite ugly. Hallward reacts with horror seeing his work is now a portrait of evil. Enraged by this, Dorian stabs him to death.
Then there is a comic-tragic encounter between, James, the brother of Sybl and Dorian. James seeks out Dorian whom he holds responsible for his sister's death eighteen years before. But instead he finds a man who appears no more than twenty. Mystified but yet suspicious, he stalks Dorian only to be killed under strange circumstances on Dorian's country estate. The police are investigating this death as well as the disappearance of the artist Basil Hallward.
Dorian decides to destroy the picture, which stood as an awful record of his guilt. He goes to the schoolroom and finds the portrait now has the appearance of cunning and triumph. He slashes it to pieces with the same knife he murdered the artist.
The servants hear a horrible cry. When they reach the schoolroom, they see a beautiful portrait on the wall, and the dead body of Dorian, withered and wrinkled in evening dress, with a knife in his chest. Only by his jewelry did they recognize Dorian Gray, who, in his desperate attempt to kill his conscience, had killed himself.
THOMAS MANN (1875 - 1945)
Thomas Man composed "Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told by a Friend" (1947) nearly four hundred years after Marlowe. On one level, it is a biographical story of a strange and fascinating genius; on another it is of a man tormented by his demons.
It may also be regarded as an excursion into a field, which present day fiction has neglected, which is that of the destruction of the human soul in the demon-haunted world of the imagination, which modern science has all but destroyed.
And it may be studied as the problem of the artist in contemporary society, of the conflict between a love of beauty and his moral responsibility to the kind of world in which he lives. It is so easy for the artist and men of conscience to get caught up in contemporary grandeur and thus lose perspective.
Beyond and beneath these levels of meaning, Mann's novel is a political and philosophical allegory deeply charged with purpose.
Mann would have us believe Leverkuhn, who gave his soul to the devil for twenty years of creative genius, symbolizes the German breakthrough to world power, and the rise of the tortured nationalism of the Nazi state.
As the narrator digresses to comment on the progress of World War II, the reader perceives that the rise and collapse of the Nazi dream runs side by side with Leverkuhn's tragic story, like musical point-counterpoint creating a mood of increasing shame and community guilt in the realization of inescapable doom.
The story ends with Leverkuhn spending the last ten years of his life quite mad, while being tenderly cared for by his aged mother at his birthplace in Thuringian. His old friend, Serenus Zeitblom was one of the few at his funeral.
It seemed to Serenus, then, and grew as he was writing this story of Adrian's life that his friend had somehow reflected the destiny of the German nation, a land arrogant, isolated, dehumanized, and at last reeling to that level of destruction, which was the price of power, as he penned his final pages in April 1945 (Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allied Forces on May 7, 1945).
FAUST IN COPENHAGEN: A STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF PHYSICS
With the nuclear bomb, man having been on the moon, and spacecraft now part of contemporary life, not to mention digital handheld contrivances, and computers with stupendous memories and flexibility, bringing us all electronically together as a single human face, it is not surprising that men and women of tremendous genius would give pause.
Early in the twentieth century many great minds were reaching fruition, but were aware at the same time, that more than ever before they needed perspective while working for this scientific revolution. Humor is the vehicle for a sense of proportion and a set of balance. And so these scientists came together to put on a Faustian play with them as players in the farce. This occurred at the Copenhagen Institute.
The early twentieth century was scientifically led by such names as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Lise Meitner, Max Planck, Erwin Schrodinger, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Richard Feyman, Max Delbruck, and George Gamow, to name a few. They passed through the Copenhagen Institute.
The founder and presiding spirit of the institute was the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Goethe's Faust was always a great love and fascination to this physicist. He dreamed of adapting it to the world of physics and physicists to illustrate how the mind and soul struggled in their work. The Faust rendition of the play was written in this context and first performed as a group enterprise in 1932.
"Faust" proved an excellent vehicle for illustrating the carping differences in this competitive scientific world. Here they could lampoon such theories (and theorists) as relativity, quantum mechanics, field theory, wave equations, string theory, and so on. Behind these innocent dramatics was the uncertainty these brilliant men and women harbored with regards to their souls. They knew with each discovery the world changed, and in the changing the consequences could not be fully understood. As Einstein said more than once, "we are having a conversation with God."
As pure and purposeful as their science, the human factor in the equation remained ever ambivalent.
Tragedy was destined to follow after that 1932 Faust performance in Copenhagen. Paul Ehrenfest, a charismatic teacher but tortured soul, was given the role of Faust. He was comfortable in the world of classical physics while feeling alien to the weird new world of quantum mechanics. Not only was this new world mystifying, he had the horrible feeling he couldn't keep up with his colleagues.
Niels Bohr, on the other hand, made the adjustment with ease and grace, while Ehrenfest was unable to make the leap. Ehrenfest wrote letters to Einstein and Bohr that he was thinking of committing suicide. The letters were never mailed. Two years later he killed himself in a park in Amsterdam.
The Faust script was never published. But like all these versions of the original play, the soul has found a lasting place in the annals of the Copenhagen group as recorded in Gino Segre's new book, "Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics" (2007).
It is no accident that kindness is considered the greatest virtue and humility the greatest expression of the soul. Faust in its various iterations leaves us with that lesson.
_____________
Dr. Fisher's latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2007
"Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Christopher Marlowe, The Tragic History of Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (1592)
"Faustian: of, relating to, resembling, or suggesting Faust; made or done for present gain without regard for future cost or consequences."
Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (1993)
* * * * * * * * *
These are the immortal lines when the devil introduces Faustus to Helen of Troy.
As with most morality plays, there is a basis in fact. Dr. Johannes Faust was a real person. He was a professional astrologer and magician who spent his time wandering from town to town in Germany during the sixteenth century. He provided horoscopes and astrological advice to bishops and princes as well as to commoners. He was famous enough to come to the attention of Martin Luther who denounced him as making a pact with the devil.
Faust's actual acquaintance with the devil is not known, but he did become a legend after his death, when an account of his life was published in Germany. It incorporated many fanciful tales borrowed from other sources. In fact down through the ages, fascination is yet to diminish. It has become the Faustian myth.
What has kept this alive is there appears a drive in man to attain an edge on his fellowman. It breaks out in mysterious ways. So, it should come as no surprise that artists would place their stamp on the myth profiling extraordinary souls.
What of ordinary souls such as you and I? Does Faust touch our lives?
Before you answer, consider the fact that many of us seek knowledge and wealth and power and influence, or some other kind of dominance, at the expense of our own personal material-spiritual balance. We become essentially one-dimensional as Herbert Marcuse suggests in his book "One Dimensional Man" (1986). We fail to see something is given up never to be regained for a temporary advantage.
There has been dissembling in science where objective truth is supposedly the anchor of the investigation. But the good and bad angel is very much in the midst of humans. I was reminded of this again when James Watson, the scientific icon and "co-discoverer" of DNA said recently that blacks are inherently inferior to whites and therefore the prospects for Africa are not good.
Watson in the chemical field was a model builder. His partner Francis Crick was a theoretical chemist. They were totally off base until the boss of Rosalind Franklin showed them her famous "photograph 51," which confirmed DNA was a double helix.
Watson savaged Franklin in his book "The Double Helix" (1968) without acknowledging her contribution. She died from excessive exposure to radiation in her research in 1958, four years before the Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1962) was awarded to Watson and Crick. Franklin was thirty-eight (see "Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA" by Brenda Maddox 2002) when she died.
Watson was very Faustian as a young man. He brazenly invited himself from the States to participate on the British team in Great Britain, which would eventually find him a scientific iconic figure. The dark side of his mind slipped out only this week with an opinion that has no basis in science. Once it was published in the press he was immediately suspended from chancellor responsibilities at the renowned Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (source: The Tampa Tribune, October 19, 2007).
It might even be suggested that the maddening race to understand the universe, or make progress our most important product is symptomatic of this Faustian myth. For such people in quest of such a “prize” nothing must stand in the way. This includes brutalizing those less motivated or driven. Indeed, such people think they are different, exceptional, unique, as if they, alone, can hold the bad angel at bay and have only the blessings of the good angel.
What is prejudice but shorthand for claiming superiority? What is the obsession with living in an affluent gated community or graduating from an exclusive university other than to create an edge? What is the obsession with knowledge, celebrity, beauty, sex, or physical prowess than Faustian?
Now, this doesn't have to be the motivation but our cultural programming surely encourages such preoccupation. We live in a sick Faustian society as indexed by disproportionate wealth where people are allowed to die every five seconds because of a simple lack of food and water. Someone says, "You're talking about Africa. This is the United States. This is not Africa."
Well, we talk about a competitive edge and competitive advantage as if they are the lexicon for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, when in truth for every gain someone else loses. The irony is that to create this edge we often stifle creativity, encourage conformity and replicate mediocrity, grinding our obsession deeper into the abyss while promoting lifestyle diseases as companion to such excess.
Many fortunes have been built on Faustian excess, as we learn if we read biographies. Read the biography of Henry Ford. His good angel found him giving workers the $5 a day wage, a pension plan, and the eight-hour working day so that he had a ready market for his Model-A and Model-T Ford, while his bad angel had him surreptitiously supporting Hitler and having an equal hatred of the Jews.
How do you know that Faust controls your nature? There is no simple answer, only ambivalent gradients of obsessive compulsiveness. Some simple questions might help: are you in control of your destiny or is your destiny in control of you? Do you have balance in your life or are you sacrificing balance now for finding it later? Are you too self-absorb to have time for family and friends? Can you never relax?
Another good indicator is when beauty or intellectual or physical prowess is flaunted and not used with modesty and humility; when self-aggrandizement becomes an end; when society becomes unequivocally narcissistic. Then the pathology of normalcy is firmly in place. I suggest it is and that we live in a sick society.
Unfortunately, the last chapter on Faust has not been written, as it lives in the heart of every ambitious person who sells his soul to attain "the prize," whatever it is. Then, it becomes pathological and eats away at the spiritual-material balance of goodness displaying itself instead in Faustian diabolical form.
The killing fields across the globe are not always those of physical murder. More often than not the killing fields are emotional and psychological abuse. The body is allowed to live but the spirit is murdered as we escape into work, career, drugs or dissipation.
It is my thesis that we promote Faustian behavior without ever mentioning the name. It is the reason suicide is the greatest killer of our young people. Not only is suicide rampant in the United States, but across the Western world, and is starting to be noted in China and India as well.
That said it might be interesting to review a few well-known Faustian myths that artists have provided us starting with the most well known from the gifted Christopher Marlowe, who never made it to the age of thirty. He was fatally wounded in a brawl at Deptford, England May 30, 1593.
Marlowe's own life was quite Faustian. His original intention was to take Holy Orders and become a priest, but he abandoned that to write plays and to become embroiled in political intrigue.
In 1589 he was involved in a scuffle with William Bradley in Norton Folgate, who died, but Marlowe’s plea of self-defense was accepted. A genius as a playwright, he was also known to have strong unorthodox religious and political opinions and would not back down from a fight. It was as if he felt immortal. In 1593, he was arrested on a charge of atheism, but met his own death before being brought to trial.
Intrigue has followed his death for more than four hundred years. The whole episode of his death is perplexing as some say he was a spy, and others say he escaped to the continent and wrote the plays for which Shakespeare is given credit.
Rodney Bolt writes in "History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe" (2005) that he staged his own death to dodge the atheism charge, fled to Europe, and wrote the great Shakespearean plays. The evidence? The language and syntax of Marlowe's "Tamburlaine" (1586 - 1587), "The Jew of Malta" (1589), and "Edward the Second" (1591).
The Faustian mind loves the idea of conspiracy. Critics insist, however, that Marlowe's plays up to 1590 are tragedies, but unlike Shakespeare's tragedies, show no real tragic sense and little skill in dramatic contrivance.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564 - 1593)
Marlowe's "The Tragedy of Dr. Faustus" (1592) is "master of all knowledge." The story as told by Marlowe finds Faustus born of base stock in Rhodes, Germany. In his maturity, while living with relatives in Wittenberg, he studies theology and is called "doctor." However, Faustus is so swollen with conceit that, like Joyce's Daedalus, strives too far, becoming glutted with learning and conspires with the devil to know everything knowable, and finally falls accursed.
The path of his downfall found him the complete master of medicine, where he had huge success. But after obtaining good health for men no challenge remained in medicine except immortality. Law was no challenge as he sensed that it was nothing but an elaborate moneymaking scheme. Only divinity remained, but it was a blind alley. Since the reward of sin was death, and since no one could escape sin, all men must die.
The Good Angel and Evil Angel tried to persuade Faustus, but he was in no mood to listen to the Good Angel. He sought to be the wealthiest man on earth with all the power that comes from such wealth. He would reform education and perform many other fabulous deeds.
His first act of magic is to summon Mephostopilis, but he is so ugly he orders him to assume the shape of a Franciscan friar. Faustus questions Mephostopilis about the nature of his master, Lucifer and Lucifer's domain, hell. Mephostopilis tells him that the fallen spirits, having been deprived of the glories of heaven, find the whole world hell.
Faustus then says he will surrender his soul to Lucifer if the fallen angel will give him twenty-four years of voluptuous ease. Lucifer agrees. Faustus thinks he has beaten the devil at his own game because he doesn’t believe in the afterlife.
During the final days of his life, Faustus asked Mephostopilis to bring him Helen of Troy as a lover. In the end, he pleads to be spared impending misery, but instead is carried off by a company of devils.
JOHANN WOLFGANG von GOETHE (1749 - 1832)
The genius of Goethe rendered a version of this great story in a clarity that still resonates with each generation throughout the world. To Goethe, the hero is simply "Faust" (1790) but the philosophical problem is the same: the human damnation through the desire for knowledge.
Echoing the sentiments of the eighteenth century "Age of Reason," which asserted that man's rationality was the supreme truth in life, Goethe created some of the most quoted passages in literature.
Then, too, Faust's cry for one moment in life of uninterrupted pleasure is echoed throughout the ages in the emotions of men of all times. Goethe cleverly creates a play of "Faust" that doesn't exist in a certain locale or time, but exists forever and everywhere.
While three archangels are singing the praises of God's lofty works, Mephistopheles appears and says that conditions on earth are bad. The Lord agrees that man has his weaknesses, but He slyly points out that His servant Faust cannot be swayed from the path of righteousness.
Mephistopheles makes a wager with the Lord that Faust can be tempted from his faithful service. The Lord knew Faust could be led downward if he were to lose his soul, while Mephistopheles knew Faust was not satisfied with all the knowledge he had acquired.
Faust confesses to his servant, Wagner, that he has two souls: one clings to earthly things, the other to super sensual things. Feeling limited in his daily existence, and wanting to be taken to another level, Faust intimates to Wagner that he would do anything to take him there.
Mephistopheles in the form of a dog follows Faust to his home. Seeing Faust contemplating the meaning of life, the dog steps forward in its true form, but Faust remains unmoved by the devil's entreaties.
The devil returns the next day and finds Faust more receptive to getting more out of life. But again Mephistopheles fails to tempt Faust with cheap debauchery.
Next the devil uses the maiden Gretchen to tempt Faust. A complicated love affair follows in which Gretchen surrenders to Faust, than is shamed by her brother, who Faust kills, only for Gretchen to kill her love child with Faust and damn herself.
Mephistopheles then brings Faust to the emperor, who asks Faust to show him the most beautiful male and female who have ever existed. Faust produces the images of Paris and Helen of Troy. Then to the devil's surprise, Faust faints. He is so overwhelmed with desire at the sight of Helen. This desire for ideal love mystifies the devil.
Mephistopheles with the help of Wagner creates a formless spirit of learning, Homunculus, who can see what is going on in Faust's mind. With that, they venture off to Greece. There a living Helen is brought to Faust with the devil now convinced he has finally found Faust's weakness. But Faust soon realizes that the enjoyment of transitory beauty is no more enduring than his other experiences.
With this new knowledge of himself, Faust returns to his native land with a pledge to use his powers in the service of men. His mystical power now banished, he stands before nature alone. His first act is to turn a large swamp into useful production. People are inspired by this act and follow by widening their creative efforts in useful ways.
Now blind and old, Faust sees his life among men as free and active and useful. At that moment, when he realizes what he has created, he cries out for this moment, so fair to him, to linger on.
Faust had emerged from being a self-centered egoist into a man who saw his actions as part of a creative society. He realized, finally, life could be worth living, but in that moment of perception he lost his wager to Mephistopheles. The devil now claims Faust's soul, but in reality he too has lost the wager. The Almighty was right. Although Faust has made a mistake in his life, he has always remained aware of goodness and truth.
Seeing his own defeat, Mephistopheles attempts to prevent the ascension of Faust's soul to God. Angels appear to help Faust, however, and he is carried into Heaven where all is active creation, exactly the kind of afterlife Faust would have chosen.
OSCAR WILDE (1856 - 1900)
"The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1891) remains a popular book over a hundred years after its first publication. Dorian Gray is very much a Faustian young man, as was the author himself, who lived an amoral life and died a young man of genius at the age of forty-four while burning the candle at both ends.
The story opens with Basil Hallward, an artist, putting the finishing touches on the portrait of his handsome young friend, Dorian Gray. Lord Henry Wotton, a caller, indolently watches the painter at work. The artist explains to Lord Henry that Dorian was his ideal of youth, and that he must promise not to influence the boy, as the artist knew Lord Henry was the personification of evil.
While the two men are talking, Dorian comes to the studio. Lord Henry immediately attempts to influence Dorian, telling him that while he will become old, wrinkled and ugly, his portrait will remain the same, frozen in beauty. This saddens Dorian and wishes that the portrait would grow old while he remains forever young. Lord Henry sees that he gets his wish becoming his Mephistopheles.
Dorian then romances a young actress, Sibyl Vane. When she is hopelessly in love with him, he coldly rejects her. She commits suicide as Dorian has killed her love. He learns of her suicide too late to ask her forgiveness, and decides, immediately, to live a life of sensation and pleasure.
One day he notices that the appearance of his portrait has changed but he has not. He hangs the portrait in an old schoolroom upstairs, locks the door, and puts the key where only he can find it.
On the eve of his thirty-eighth birthday, he takes the artist to the portrait to show what it has become. It was now quite ugly. Hallward reacts with horror seeing his work is now a portrait of evil. Enraged by this, Dorian stabs him to death.
Then there is a comic-tragic encounter between, James, the brother of Sybl and Dorian. James seeks out Dorian whom he holds responsible for his sister's death eighteen years before. But instead he finds a man who appears no more than twenty. Mystified but yet suspicious, he stalks Dorian only to be killed under strange circumstances on Dorian's country estate. The police are investigating this death as well as the disappearance of the artist Basil Hallward.
Dorian decides to destroy the picture, which stood as an awful record of his guilt. He goes to the schoolroom and finds the portrait now has the appearance of cunning and triumph. He slashes it to pieces with the same knife he murdered the artist.
The servants hear a horrible cry. When they reach the schoolroom, they see a beautiful portrait on the wall, and the dead body of Dorian, withered and wrinkled in evening dress, with a knife in his chest. Only by his jewelry did they recognize Dorian Gray, who, in his desperate attempt to kill his conscience, had killed himself.
THOMAS MANN (1875 - 1945)
Thomas Man composed "Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told by a Friend" (1947) nearly four hundred years after Marlowe. On one level, it is a biographical story of a strange and fascinating genius; on another it is of a man tormented by his demons.
It may also be regarded as an excursion into a field, which present day fiction has neglected, which is that of the destruction of the human soul in the demon-haunted world of the imagination, which modern science has all but destroyed.
And it may be studied as the problem of the artist in contemporary society, of the conflict between a love of beauty and his moral responsibility to the kind of world in which he lives. It is so easy for the artist and men of conscience to get caught up in contemporary grandeur and thus lose perspective.
Beyond and beneath these levels of meaning, Mann's novel is a political and philosophical allegory deeply charged with purpose.
Mann would have us believe Leverkuhn, who gave his soul to the devil for twenty years of creative genius, symbolizes the German breakthrough to world power, and the rise of the tortured nationalism of the Nazi state.
As the narrator digresses to comment on the progress of World War II, the reader perceives that the rise and collapse of the Nazi dream runs side by side with Leverkuhn's tragic story, like musical point-counterpoint creating a mood of increasing shame and community guilt in the realization of inescapable doom.
The story ends with Leverkuhn spending the last ten years of his life quite mad, while being tenderly cared for by his aged mother at his birthplace in Thuringian. His old friend, Serenus Zeitblom was one of the few at his funeral.
It seemed to Serenus, then, and grew as he was writing this story of Adrian's life that his friend had somehow reflected the destiny of the German nation, a land arrogant, isolated, dehumanized, and at last reeling to that level of destruction, which was the price of power, as he penned his final pages in April 1945 (Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allied Forces on May 7, 1945).
FAUST IN COPENHAGEN: A STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF PHYSICS
With the nuclear bomb, man having been on the moon, and spacecraft now part of contemporary life, not to mention digital handheld contrivances, and computers with stupendous memories and flexibility, bringing us all electronically together as a single human face, it is not surprising that men and women of tremendous genius would give pause.
Early in the twentieth century many great minds were reaching fruition, but were aware at the same time, that more than ever before they needed perspective while working for this scientific revolution. Humor is the vehicle for a sense of proportion and a set of balance. And so these scientists came together to put on a Faustian play with them as players in the farce. This occurred at the Copenhagen Institute.
The early twentieth century was scientifically led by such names as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Lise Meitner, Max Planck, Erwin Schrodinger, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Richard Feyman, Max Delbruck, and George Gamow, to name a few. They passed through the Copenhagen Institute.
The founder and presiding spirit of the institute was the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Goethe's Faust was always a great love and fascination to this physicist. He dreamed of adapting it to the world of physics and physicists to illustrate how the mind and soul struggled in their work. The Faust rendition of the play was written in this context and first performed as a group enterprise in 1932.
"Faust" proved an excellent vehicle for illustrating the carping differences in this competitive scientific world. Here they could lampoon such theories (and theorists) as relativity, quantum mechanics, field theory, wave equations, string theory, and so on. Behind these innocent dramatics was the uncertainty these brilliant men and women harbored with regards to their souls. They knew with each discovery the world changed, and in the changing the consequences could not be fully understood. As Einstein said more than once, "we are having a conversation with God."
As pure and purposeful as their science, the human factor in the equation remained ever ambivalent.
Tragedy was destined to follow after that 1932 Faust performance in Copenhagen. Paul Ehrenfest, a charismatic teacher but tortured soul, was given the role of Faust. He was comfortable in the world of classical physics while feeling alien to the weird new world of quantum mechanics. Not only was this new world mystifying, he had the horrible feeling he couldn't keep up with his colleagues.
Niels Bohr, on the other hand, made the adjustment with ease and grace, while Ehrenfest was unable to make the leap. Ehrenfest wrote letters to Einstein and Bohr that he was thinking of committing suicide. The letters were never mailed. Two years later he killed himself in a park in Amsterdam.
The Faust script was never published. But like all these versions of the original play, the soul has found a lasting place in the annals of the Copenhagen group as recorded in Gino Segre's new book, "Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics" (2007).
It is no accident that kindness is considered the greatest virtue and humility the greatest expression of the soul. Faust in its various iterations leaves us with that lesson.
_____________
Dr. Fisher's latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2
Friday, October 12, 2007
FRAGILE NATURE OF LEADERSHIP & HOW EVENTS SHAPE IT
FRAGILE NATURE OF LEADERSHIP & HOW EVENTS SHAPE IT
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2007
Symbolic interaction: The typical form of communication and interaction characteristic of human social life, involving either language or symbolic gestures.
George A. and Achilles G. Theodorson: Modern Dictionary of Sociology (1969)
Those that are regular readers of my missives know I have made an effort to concentrate on leadership, seeing an absence of leadership not only across the United States, but also across the globe. Something of leadership’s reptilian character has been lost, and for it we are all suffering.
We are a fatherless and motherless society, which has become a North American cultural plague, but not limited to the US. We have exported the plague to all progressive societies, who would emulate our Western-style conceit.
Broken relationships with parents are like broken relationships with God. “God” is a construct as endemic to atheists as to believers. It is also endemic to believers in ideologies. People have exalted fascism and communism, and now radical Islam in replacement roles for their gods. This is dangerous to society.
Ultimately, radicalism doesn’t work out.
People, who drift into radicalism, do bad things. Power and opacity become the diet of choice for leadership roles bent on playing God. The longing for God, or an appropriate substitute, never goes away. There has to be something bigger and better than ourselves to keep us on track.
That said we have drifted into a world in which people continue to do good although they have ceased to believe in anything.
Sociologists call this “nihilism,” while philosophers are content to see it as “existentialism.” Whatever it is called, the connection between things going radically wrong is closely related to the general decay of piety. I prefer this word to goodness because it is not a word in which to hide.
Having opened with this preamble, I now make a departure. History shows us that true believers, religious and political leaders, all those who have no doubt of the truth of their views, have constantly taken us to war.
It is in war that we learn of the reptilian nature of leadership. The collateral damage of war always effects the innocent and the poorest. They look for their symbolic God in their leaders. This is the source of their motivation, seeing such leaders as powerful and mysterious, but seldom ineffectual.
It takes a peculiar type of leader to connect this patch quilt of subjectivity with the serendipity of history to carry a people forward. I am always amazed at the fragility of leadership and the uncertainty of events to spin a society on the horns of a dilemma between collapse and resilience. How easily events could have fallen either way, but for an individual with the pluck and luck, intuition and bravado, or simply being the right person doing the right thing at the right time in the right way.
Since I am not a historian, my expertise being in organization/industrial psychology, I offer these thoughts on leaders and leadership from my pondering books read for the reader’s reflection and consideration.
George Washington:
There is a plethora of books on the “Father of Our Country” (currently I’m reading John Buchanan’s “The Road to Valley Forge”). Added to this, I listened recently to David McCullough’s “1776” on a CD during my return to Florida from my book signing trip in Iowa.
McCullough’s book is consistent with the symbolic detail associated with our first president, that is, George Washington always dressed like a general in the most splendid fashion against the rag-tag appearance of his rag-tag troops. This made certain that the Yankee soldier took pride in himself and his cause, as well as his general.
Formality and form were basic to Washington. Tall, six-two, and strongly built, he carried himself with authority, and walked with dignity. Should anyone touch him, he would scorch them with his eyes.
Washington was not a great strategist as a general, but was bold and brave, and credited with only one victory in the Revolutionary War. Nor did he have the quality of mind of either a Thomas Jefferson or John Adams; yet neither man would brook his will in the exercise of his power.
Andrew Jackson:
I’ve written volumes on this great general and effective president. He was not modest about his disdain for formal education, which he did not have, or books and ideas, which he did not read or take seriously.
Jackson saw himself as a decisive “man of action.” He operated intuitively and never questioned his decisions. His gusto and gumption saved the nation at the “Battle of New Orleans,” when the United States was literally teetering on extinction.
As president, he made a symbolic move of power from the Eastern elite few to the common many in the middle of the country. He also took on the banking system that was privy to a few.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s “Age of Jackson” (1945) captures a sense of this. Schlesinger was actually using the Jackson legacy to promote President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” conspicuously leaving out the embarrassment of the forced migration of Native Americans to the northwest. Gloria Jahoda’s “The Trail of Tears: The Story of the American Indian Removals 1813 – 1835” fills this void.
Ulysses S. Grant & George McClellan:
Much is written about President Abraham Lincoln, his courage and humor, and how language was his sword, but he wasn’t the first or the last president that had to deal with pompous generals, such as general George McClellan.
As head of the Army of the Potomac, McClellan nearly lost the Civil War with his incompetence, indecisiveness and failure to think beyond his career.
On the other hand, general Ulysses S. Grant was a risk taker. He had failed in business and was retrieved from retirement where he had the reputation of being a drunk. Once in uniform again, he demonstrated an instinct for taking charge and going for the jugular against the Confederate Army. Hostilities over, he treated general Robert E. Lee with respect and dignity at the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Court.
As a politician, Grant was ineffective as president, failing to manage reconstruction of the South with either skill or understanding, while allowing his administration to be writhe with scandal.
LOOKING AT THE PRECARIOUS NATURE OF LEADERSHIP CLOSE UP
World War II was fought during my preadolescence. I followed the war closely. Sister Mary Helen, my fourth grade teacher, allowed me to report on it in class. I also read Sinclair Lewis’s book “It Can’t Happen Here,” which dealt with what it would be like should fascism come to America. I wasn't sure what fascism was but I thought I understood what Lewis meant by a police state.
Now, more than sixty years after that war, a book titled “Moscow 1941” creates a new appreciation of that war from the perspective of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Here leadership and symbolism become a critical mass.
On June 23, 1941, a day after the German invasion into Russia, the Wehrmacht had destroyed the entire Soviet air force.
By June 28, German troops had entered Minsk.
On June 29, Stalin failed to appear in the Kremlin. He did not appear the next day or the day after. He had returned to his dacha. Members of the Politburo nervously made their way there, only to find Stalin with the strangest look on his face. Stalin assumed they had come to kill him. They had come instead to ask him to be their leader in this, the Soviet Union's darkest hour.
By November 7, 1941, it is a different Stalin the world sees. He is seen standing in Moscow’s Red Square defiantly holding the anniversary celebration of the October (1917) Revolution. Imagine the courage it took to hold this ceremony complete with the traditional military parade as German guns roared in the distance. Even the soldiers marching in that parade were combat troops quickly pulled from the front lines for the occasion.
The propaganda impact on the Russian people was extraordinary. It became a moral turning point.
It was important for Soviet citizens to see their leader resolutely standing, ignoring the imminence of being invaded at any time, as the German army was now on the outskirts of Moscow. Nothing was to stop tradition. The synergy between citizen and soldier became singularly deterministic.
That said Stalin’s leadership and that of the German generals was mired in missed opportunities followed by strategic breakthroughs and blunders, while both sides demonstrated exemplary valor.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the US ambassador to Moscow had warmed Stalin of an imminent German invasion, but he was too paranoid to see anything but the Allies playing Germany and Russia against each other. The invasion came as a total surprise with the Germans 450 miles within Russia in the first month.
It was at this point that Hitler started making mistakes. Leaders read history and often are spooked by it. Hitler feared history repeating itself with Germany coming to the same end as Napoleon in 1812. So, instead of closing in on Moscow, Hitler decided to postpone that effort, and turn his attention to capturing the rich oil and coalfields of the eastern Ukraine.
This delay allowed the Russian Army to regroup and for Stalin to recover his nerve.
The Wehrmacht’s “Operation Typhoon,” as the assault on Moscow was codenamed, was quite successful in early October 1941. German troops encircled several nearby Soviet armies. The death toll from this engagement was so high that the army couldn’t keep up with the task of burying the dead, with soldiers finally left where they had fallen.
By mid-October the Soviet government had mobilized hundreds of thousands of civilians who constructed fortifications and dug tens of thousands of anti-tank trenches to prevent an easy rout. The consensus was that Moscow was doomed and the end was near, but Muscovites would go down fighting.
What happened on October 16, 1941, which historians now conclude was one of the most important moments of the war, is rarely told.
The propaganda on both sides was passionately idealistic. On one side stood Hitler, fascism, and the myth of German supremacy; on the other stood Stalin, communism, and the myth of the international proletarian revolution. Both sides claimed ideological, psychological, and moral supremacy. Stalin portrayed the Germans as “heirs of world capitalism and out to restore the rule of landlords.” Hitler, meanwhile, spoke of the Soviet Union being a country of a “Slavic-Tartar body” and a “Jewish head.” Bolshevism, he concluded, “attacks the foundation of human order, the concept of civilization, our faith and our morals.”
So effective was this rhetoric that Soviet soldiers and Russian citizens were declaring, “We will not work for landlords and noblemen,” while German soldiers were condeming “Jews and Bolsheviks” seeing them both as the same.
Thanks to propaganda, both sides came to believe in the certainty of victory: the Germans held to their own racial superiority, while the Red Army were convinced scientific Marxism and communism had to triumph.
No day shattered both myths more decisively than October 16, 1941.
With the Germans only a few miles away, Muscovites awoke to a city transformed. There were no buses, no trams, no Metro, no mailmen, no garbage pickups, no police. The streets were covered in ash, and the air filled with it, a result of thousands of bonfires.
Bureaucrats, politicians, and even ordinary people were burning documents, Party cards, and Marxist tracts, even portraits of Stalin in anticipation of the arrival of their conquerors. They were ready to greet them as their new heroes, their “liberators,” as victors. Workers were turned away at factory gates. Machinery was shut down and being packed for evacuation. Rumors spread of a coup d’etat and Stalin’s arrest.
Most unfortunately of all, people repressed from speaking their minds, now began to talk freely and openly. They shouted that they had been betrayed, remembered humiliations, injustices, deceptions and transgressions.
Meanwhile, preparations were being made to blow up key factories, bridges, dams and railways.
But October 17, 1941 came and the Germans had not arrived.
In the interim of a single day, it immediately became apparent to ordinary Muscovites the deep divide between the privileged Communist elite and the downtrodden proletariat. Bigwigs, party bosses, and anyone with a car began to drive east, taking family and possessions with them. Riots broke out, fights started in food queues. Others refused to join trench battalions. It was a state of anarchy.
Then something happened. In this state of near total chaos and collapse, word quickly passed through the streets that Stalin had not left Moscow. Whatever was his motivation, it became the most important decision of the war for ordinary Russians.
Stalin's symbolic behavior stated loud and clear: if Moscow falls, I will fall with her.
It was electric. Muscovites declared in a single voice, we, too, will give our best for our leader and country, and they did.
There is no way he could have known the impact of his decision.
Russians had lost four million men, 17,000 aircraft, 60,000 guns and mortars, or all the stocks and weapons they had built up in the years before the war. They were practically defenseless.
But on the outskirts of Moscow, the German army had run out of steam. They were worn down by the weather, lacked supplies for the winter, and were exhausted from the long struggle and the diversions. The Wehrmacht would have many future victories against this setback, but the failure to capture Moscow dealt the army a psychological blow every bit as significant as the boost it gave to the Red Army.
What the Battle of Moscow demonstrated to the Western Allies, who had yet to be successful, was that the world’s finest and most experienced military could be beaten, could be ground down, and comprehensively defeated.
We see the same thing in sport when a team which seems invincible is finally defeated. After Moscow, Stalin threw tens of thousands of men and boys against the Germans. Often poorly armed, the sheer magnitude of Stalin’s capacity to take casualties, throwing wave after wave of these Russians against the better-trained and armed Germans, proved the difference in the end.
Leadership is not a style, not an academic curriculum, not a mathematical algorithm, or some learned system from an academic or guru. Nor is it a set of words or schematics of a PowerPoint presentation on leadership.
Leadership is that very human quality that manifests itself in our reptilian brain to reach beyond logic and systematic thought to address issues of survival when men are reduced to a single spirit, and undifferentiated unity.
Just as none of us knows whether we will be brave or cowardly in a moment of supreme danger, there is no way of predicting when a leader will stay the course or cave into its pressure.
Leaders do not know how they will act until the situation presents itself. A life is the best guide. So, how do we choose our leaders? We don’t. They choose us.
Dr. Fisher’s latest book, for which this is a continuing mantra, is A Look Back To See Ahead (AuthorHouse 2007).
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2007
Symbolic interaction: The typical form of communication and interaction characteristic of human social life, involving either language or symbolic gestures.
George A. and Achilles G. Theodorson: Modern Dictionary of Sociology (1969)
Those that are regular readers of my missives know I have made an effort to concentrate on leadership, seeing an absence of leadership not only across the United States, but also across the globe. Something of leadership’s reptilian character has been lost, and for it we are all suffering.
We are a fatherless and motherless society, which has become a North American cultural plague, but not limited to the US. We have exported the plague to all progressive societies, who would emulate our Western-style conceit.
Broken relationships with parents are like broken relationships with God. “God” is a construct as endemic to atheists as to believers. It is also endemic to believers in ideologies. People have exalted fascism and communism, and now radical Islam in replacement roles for their gods. This is dangerous to society.
Ultimately, radicalism doesn’t work out.
People, who drift into radicalism, do bad things. Power and opacity become the diet of choice for leadership roles bent on playing God. The longing for God, or an appropriate substitute, never goes away. There has to be something bigger and better than ourselves to keep us on track.
That said we have drifted into a world in which people continue to do good although they have ceased to believe in anything.
Sociologists call this “nihilism,” while philosophers are content to see it as “existentialism.” Whatever it is called, the connection between things going radically wrong is closely related to the general decay of piety. I prefer this word to goodness because it is not a word in which to hide.
Having opened with this preamble, I now make a departure. History shows us that true believers, religious and political leaders, all those who have no doubt of the truth of their views, have constantly taken us to war.
It is in war that we learn of the reptilian nature of leadership. The collateral damage of war always effects the innocent and the poorest. They look for their symbolic God in their leaders. This is the source of their motivation, seeing such leaders as powerful and mysterious, but seldom ineffectual.
It takes a peculiar type of leader to connect this patch quilt of subjectivity with the serendipity of history to carry a people forward. I am always amazed at the fragility of leadership and the uncertainty of events to spin a society on the horns of a dilemma between collapse and resilience. How easily events could have fallen either way, but for an individual with the pluck and luck, intuition and bravado, or simply being the right person doing the right thing at the right time in the right way.
Since I am not a historian, my expertise being in organization/industrial psychology, I offer these thoughts on leaders and leadership from my pondering books read for the reader’s reflection and consideration.
George Washington:
There is a plethora of books on the “Father of Our Country” (currently I’m reading John Buchanan’s “The Road to Valley Forge”). Added to this, I listened recently to David McCullough’s “1776” on a CD during my return to Florida from my book signing trip in Iowa.
McCullough’s book is consistent with the symbolic detail associated with our first president, that is, George Washington always dressed like a general in the most splendid fashion against the rag-tag appearance of his rag-tag troops. This made certain that the Yankee soldier took pride in himself and his cause, as well as his general.
Formality and form were basic to Washington. Tall, six-two, and strongly built, he carried himself with authority, and walked with dignity. Should anyone touch him, he would scorch them with his eyes.
Washington was not a great strategist as a general, but was bold and brave, and credited with only one victory in the Revolutionary War. Nor did he have the quality of mind of either a Thomas Jefferson or John Adams; yet neither man would brook his will in the exercise of his power.
Andrew Jackson:
I’ve written volumes on this great general and effective president. He was not modest about his disdain for formal education, which he did not have, or books and ideas, which he did not read or take seriously.
Jackson saw himself as a decisive “man of action.” He operated intuitively and never questioned his decisions. His gusto and gumption saved the nation at the “Battle of New Orleans,” when the United States was literally teetering on extinction.
As president, he made a symbolic move of power from the Eastern elite few to the common many in the middle of the country. He also took on the banking system that was privy to a few.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s “Age of Jackson” (1945) captures a sense of this. Schlesinger was actually using the Jackson legacy to promote President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” conspicuously leaving out the embarrassment of the forced migration of Native Americans to the northwest. Gloria Jahoda’s “The Trail of Tears: The Story of the American Indian Removals 1813 – 1835” fills this void.
Ulysses S. Grant & George McClellan:
Much is written about President Abraham Lincoln, his courage and humor, and how language was his sword, but he wasn’t the first or the last president that had to deal with pompous generals, such as general George McClellan.
As head of the Army of the Potomac, McClellan nearly lost the Civil War with his incompetence, indecisiveness and failure to think beyond his career.
On the other hand, general Ulysses S. Grant was a risk taker. He had failed in business and was retrieved from retirement where he had the reputation of being a drunk. Once in uniform again, he demonstrated an instinct for taking charge and going for the jugular against the Confederate Army. Hostilities over, he treated general Robert E. Lee with respect and dignity at the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Court.
As a politician, Grant was ineffective as president, failing to manage reconstruction of the South with either skill or understanding, while allowing his administration to be writhe with scandal.
LOOKING AT THE PRECARIOUS NATURE OF LEADERSHIP CLOSE UP
World War II was fought during my preadolescence. I followed the war closely. Sister Mary Helen, my fourth grade teacher, allowed me to report on it in class. I also read Sinclair Lewis’s book “It Can’t Happen Here,” which dealt with what it would be like should fascism come to America. I wasn't sure what fascism was but I thought I understood what Lewis meant by a police state.
Now, more than sixty years after that war, a book titled “Moscow 1941” creates a new appreciation of that war from the perspective of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Here leadership and symbolism become a critical mass.
On June 23, 1941, a day after the German invasion into Russia, the Wehrmacht had destroyed the entire Soviet air force.
By June 28, German troops had entered Minsk.
On June 29, Stalin failed to appear in the Kremlin. He did not appear the next day or the day after. He had returned to his dacha. Members of the Politburo nervously made their way there, only to find Stalin with the strangest look on his face. Stalin assumed they had come to kill him. They had come instead to ask him to be their leader in this, the Soviet Union's darkest hour.
By November 7, 1941, it is a different Stalin the world sees. He is seen standing in Moscow’s Red Square defiantly holding the anniversary celebration of the October (1917) Revolution. Imagine the courage it took to hold this ceremony complete with the traditional military parade as German guns roared in the distance. Even the soldiers marching in that parade were combat troops quickly pulled from the front lines for the occasion.
The propaganda impact on the Russian people was extraordinary. It became a moral turning point.
It was important for Soviet citizens to see their leader resolutely standing, ignoring the imminence of being invaded at any time, as the German army was now on the outskirts of Moscow. Nothing was to stop tradition. The synergy between citizen and soldier became singularly deterministic.
That said Stalin’s leadership and that of the German generals was mired in missed opportunities followed by strategic breakthroughs and blunders, while both sides demonstrated exemplary valor.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the US ambassador to Moscow had warmed Stalin of an imminent German invasion, but he was too paranoid to see anything but the Allies playing Germany and Russia against each other. The invasion came as a total surprise with the Germans 450 miles within Russia in the first month.
It was at this point that Hitler started making mistakes. Leaders read history and often are spooked by it. Hitler feared history repeating itself with Germany coming to the same end as Napoleon in 1812. So, instead of closing in on Moscow, Hitler decided to postpone that effort, and turn his attention to capturing the rich oil and coalfields of the eastern Ukraine.
This delay allowed the Russian Army to regroup and for Stalin to recover his nerve.
The Wehrmacht’s “Operation Typhoon,” as the assault on Moscow was codenamed, was quite successful in early October 1941. German troops encircled several nearby Soviet armies. The death toll from this engagement was so high that the army couldn’t keep up with the task of burying the dead, with soldiers finally left where they had fallen.
By mid-October the Soviet government had mobilized hundreds of thousands of civilians who constructed fortifications and dug tens of thousands of anti-tank trenches to prevent an easy rout. The consensus was that Moscow was doomed and the end was near, but Muscovites would go down fighting.
What happened on October 16, 1941, which historians now conclude was one of the most important moments of the war, is rarely told.
The propaganda on both sides was passionately idealistic. On one side stood Hitler, fascism, and the myth of German supremacy; on the other stood Stalin, communism, and the myth of the international proletarian revolution. Both sides claimed ideological, psychological, and moral supremacy. Stalin portrayed the Germans as “heirs of world capitalism and out to restore the rule of landlords.” Hitler, meanwhile, spoke of the Soviet Union being a country of a “Slavic-Tartar body” and a “Jewish head.” Bolshevism, he concluded, “attacks the foundation of human order, the concept of civilization, our faith and our morals.”
So effective was this rhetoric that Soviet soldiers and Russian citizens were declaring, “We will not work for landlords and noblemen,” while German soldiers were condeming “Jews and Bolsheviks” seeing them both as the same.
Thanks to propaganda, both sides came to believe in the certainty of victory: the Germans held to their own racial superiority, while the Red Army were convinced scientific Marxism and communism had to triumph.
No day shattered both myths more decisively than October 16, 1941.
With the Germans only a few miles away, Muscovites awoke to a city transformed. There were no buses, no trams, no Metro, no mailmen, no garbage pickups, no police. The streets were covered in ash, and the air filled with it, a result of thousands of bonfires.
Bureaucrats, politicians, and even ordinary people were burning documents, Party cards, and Marxist tracts, even portraits of Stalin in anticipation of the arrival of their conquerors. They were ready to greet them as their new heroes, their “liberators,” as victors. Workers were turned away at factory gates. Machinery was shut down and being packed for evacuation. Rumors spread of a coup d’etat and Stalin’s arrest.
Most unfortunately of all, people repressed from speaking their minds, now began to talk freely and openly. They shouted that they had been betrayed, remembered humiliations, injustices, deceptions and transgressions.
Meanwhile, preparations were being made to blow up key factories, bridges, dams and railways.
But October 17, 1941 came and the Germans had not arrived.
In the interim of a single day, it immediately became apparent to ordinary Muscovites the deep divide between the privileged Communist elite and the downtrodden proletariat. Bigwigs, party bosses, and anyone with a car began to drive east, taking family and possessions with them. Riots broke out, fights started in food queues. Others refused to join trench battalions. It was a state of anarchy.
Then something happened. In this state of near total chaos and collapse, word quickly passed through the streets that Stalin had not left Moscow. Whatever was his motivation, it became the most important decision of the war for ordinary Russians.
Stalin's symbolic behavior stated loud and clear: if Moscow falls, I will fall with her.
It was electric. Muscovites declared in a single voice, we, too, will give our best for our leader and country, and they did.
There is no way he could have known the impact of his decision.
Russians had lost four million men, 17,000 aircraft, 60,000 guns and mortars, or all the stocks and weapons they had built up in the years before the war. They were practically defenseless.
But on the outskirts of Moscow, the German army had run out of steam. They were worn down by the weather, lacked supplies for the winter, and were exhausted from the long struggle and the diversions. The Wehrmacht would have many future victories against this setback, but the failure to capture Moscow dealt the army a psychological blow every bit as significant as the boost it gave to the Red Army.
What the Battle of Moscow demonstrated to the Western Allies, who had yet to be successful, was that the world’s finest and most experienced military could be beaten, could be ground down, and comprehensively defeated.
We see the same thing in sport when a team which seems invincible is finally defeated. After Moscow, Stalin threw tens of thousands of men and boys against the Germans. Often poorly armed, the sheer magnitude of Stalin’s capacity to take casualties, throwing wave after wave of these Russians against the better-trained and armed Germans, proved the difference in the end.
Leadership is not a style, not an academic curriculum, not a mathematical algorithm, or some learned system from an academic or guru. Nor is it a set of words or schematics of a PowerPoint presentation on leadership.
Leadership is that very human quality that manifests itself in our reptilian brain to reach beyond logic and systematic thought to address issues of survival when men are reduced to a single spirit, and undifferentiated unity.
Just as none of us knows whether we will be brave or cowardly in a moment of supreme danger, there is no way of predicting when a leader will stay the course or cave into its pressure.
Leaders do not know how they will act until the situation presents itself. A life is the best guide. So, how do we choose our leaders? We don’t. They choose us.
Dr. Fisher’s latest book, for which this is a continuing mantra, is A Look Back To See Ahead (AuthorHouse 2007).
Thursday, October 11, 2007
NOBODY ESCAPES THE BRUTALITY OF WAR!
NOBODY ESCAPES THE BRUTALITY OF WAR
ANOTHER THEME OF “A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2007
“The chief evil of war is more evil. War is the concentration of all human crimes. Here is its distinguishing, accursed brand. Under its standard gather violence, malignity, rage, fraud, perfidy, rapacity, and lust. If it only slew man, it would do little. It turns man into a beast of prey.”
William Ellery Channing (1780 – 1842), American Unitarian minister
* * * * * * * * *
We all know war is hell, and we all feel when we are engaged in war we are on the right side, fighting for peace and freedom. This implies that we are different than our enemies. We have a higher purpose and that purpose is to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. War is ugly, however, and it makes people enmeshed in war ugly for the attention, as brutality can, often does possess the victors as well as the vanquished, as part of the spoils of war.
Our fourth president, James Madison (1751 – 1836), perhaps the least known of the Founding Fathers, and a framer of the Federal constitution along with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, once said:
“Of all the evils to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies and debts, and taxes, are the known instruments for bringing the many under the dominion of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended; its influences in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people! No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
These words and those of Reverend Channing come to mind in reading of another war, the cruel Allied occupation of Giles MacDonogh’s carefully researched book, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (Basic Books 2007).
We have had a scattering of reported brutalities by the Coalition Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, but this study of the Allied occupation of Germany immediately following World War II has the leavening effect of more than sixty years. It indicates that to the victors may go the spoils, but often the brutality differs little with that perceived as formerly germane only to the enemy, in this case, the Nazis.
In the spring of 1945, Germany went down into chaos and defeat, and became an occupied territory by its enemies. Many Germans were consigned to slave labor, concentration camps, starvation, or imprisonment without charge. Nor did executions disappear with the defeat of the Nazis. Jews and others so incarcerated were liberated, but such prisons as Bergen-Belsen now housed German citizens and former German soldiers.
As early as 1943, the Allies had set their sights on unconditional German surrender, but on June 5, 1944, when it was administered with much military pomp, there was no German government, making the document of doubtful legality.
It went beyond that. The United States, Great Britain and Russia summarily divided Germany into occupied territories or military governance zones, eventually including France. At the same time, Germans, who had lived for generations in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia, were to be repatriated in an orderly and humane manner back into Germany over a five-year period. It didn’t happen like this, as Giles MacDonogh documents in this stunning story.
The innocent always experience the collateral damage of war. The native population turns on its former German masters by committing rape, murder and pillage of its German-speaking neighbors who are now persona non grata. The natives do this with impunity while failing to realize their neighbors are as much victims as they are. Entire communities of Germans, who had lived outside the Reich, often for generations, were uprooted at gunpoint. In the end, 16 million people were expelled from their homes.
Robbed, beaten, starved, old men, women, and children were forced to march westward, or crammed into cattle cars in which they sometimes froze to death. MacDonogh takes the reader along on these fearful journeys, village by village, describing the hideous migration.
These displaced German-speakers arrived in their “homeland” already swollen with millions of rootless people. At the same time, the Wehrmacht, the beaten German army of millions, were forced to wait in literally cages to be discharged.
During the war, 11 million German soldiers had been captured. Seven and half million were in the hands of the Western Allies, five million of whom were released within a year. One and a half million disappeared in Soviet Russia and countries of the East. In the spring of 1945, some 40,000 prisoners died of hunger and exposure in twelve open camps that Americans set up to contain a million men.
Almost immediately after the war, the Cold War commenced with Soviet Russia. Direct Interrogation Centers were set up throughout the American and British zones to drill ex-POW, where appalling brutality was justified to extract critical information regarding Russian espionage, mirroring in many cases practices formerly used by the Nazis.
As these notorious methods started to leak to the press, however, especially of the Bad Nenndorf Center in the British Zone, pressure was put to desist with such practices. Eventually, Bad Nenndorf and other like centers were closed. Attempts to bring charges against personnel guilty of brutality in these centers fizzled, as the media tired of the reporting.
The US Army did not want to hold on to prisoners of war, or for it to get out that they were being used as forced labor. That would not be well received in the United States. The British, however, were convinced this was fair reparation for the incessant Nazis V-2 rocket attacks on England during the war. Besides, England needed about half a million former German prisoners to work mainly in agriculture.
Before being transferred to Great Britain, these “POW’s,” even though the war was over, were held in “POW” camps in Germany and Belgium to await deportation. Conditions in these camps were appalling. German ex-soldiers, who knew how to run such camps, were put in charge. They were brutal to their former mates-in-arms. They hoarded the food, the bedding, blankets and even clothes the British dispense for the camps. Men slept on straw and shivered some literally to death. Only four electric light bulbs were in one entire camp with no soap or towels with as many as five hundred men having to share a single washroom.
To give you a sense of the paranoia at the time, Stalin thought the Four Powers were creating a new German army to fight against the Soviet Union, and so he opposed any capitulation.
Once the Allies adopted a blueprint for occupied governance, the first order of business was to erase Nazi government and Nazi law from the books, and exclude Nazi Party members from any chance of power in public office or top positions in finance, industry, commerce, agriculture, education, publishing, and the press. The Allies soon realized that “nominal members of the Party” should not be excluded because with such exclusion, few were qualified or experienced to run operations. So, from the very beginning, a wink and a promise as well as expediency became the order of the day.
In this fractured society, decimated and demoralized, the haves and haves nothing spawned corruption, looting, the black market, false documents and an endless noir worthy of spy fiction. Moreover, the absence of so many men for so long by death or imprisonment created a social and moral vacuum. Women, now the chief breadwinners for their families, would do whatever was necessary to keep their families intact. It became common for women to exchange a PX package for sex or cigarettes without any compunction or social alarm.
The German population was not only homeless but also hungry. The near starvation of the German people was not deliberate, although many Germans thought it was. It was part of a pattern. The area controlled by the Soviets possessed the rich farmlands. Under the reparation arrangements, Russia was obliged to send food to the West. It never did.
The Allies were on the horns of a dilemma. They had to feed the Germans or get out, and getting out now was thought to mean letting the Russians in. Then the bitterest winter in a hundred years hit Germany in 1946 – 1947. Northern German waterways were frozen for months. With little food or fuel, freezing to death became common. Yet the Allies, especially Great Britain, considered it “not our problem.” The British were bitter. They felt Germany deserved the punishment, and unlike the Americans, they had no intentions of rebuilding German industry.
This did not make sense to Germans. Heavy machinery vital to reconstruction was being demolished. Men were thrown out of industrial work with no prospect for reemployment. It appeared that the Allies were bent on reducing Germany to an agrarian society. Winston Churchill, who was at first not opposed to such draconian measures, was finally appalled at what he saw:
“We cannot afford, nor can the United States, to let chaos and misery continue indefinitely in our Zones of Germany. The idea of keeping millions of people hanging about in a sub-human state between earth and hell, until they are worn down to a slave condition or embrace Communism, will only breed at least a moral pestilence and probably an actual war. Let Germany live!”
Following this, the Americans and British fused their two zones economically and issued a new currency. The Russians retaliated by blockading supplies to the Western sector of Berlin. The famous “Berlin Airlift” followed. It not only provided food and staples through the air for the suffering Berliners, but also turned the focus to the intrinsic spirit of goodness of both countries. It was their finest hour as many have said, and has proven a bonding of the German spirit to the West to this day.
As MacDonogh explains in this book:
“Friends of mine have often told me that the Germans deserved what they got in 1945: it was a just punishment for their behavior in occupied lands and for the treatment of the Jews at home. This book is not intended to excuse the Germans, but it does not hesitate to expose the victorious Allies in their treatment of the enemy at the peace, for in most cases it was not the criminals who were raped, starved, tortured or bludgeoned to death but women, children, and old men. What I record and sometimes call into question here is the way that many people were allowed to exact that revenge by military commanders, even by government ministers, and that when they did so they often killed the innocent, not the guilty. The real murderers all too often died in their beds.”
It is unsettling to read that countries can carry grudges and vengeance in their hearts the same as individuals; that man’s inhumanity to man is not isolated to one people, but part of the fabric of mankind. The reader may be numbed by such an account, or he may be incredulous to its veracity. It is offered here in my continuing reminder of my own book, A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, which closes here with the words of the Spanish philosopher George Santayana (1863 – 1952), who reminded us “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
Dr. Fisher’s latest book is A Look Back to See Ahead (AuthorHouse 2007). See www.authorhouse.com.
ANOTHER THEME OF “A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2007
“The chief evil of war is more evil. War is the concentration of all human crimes. Here is its distinguishing, accursed brand. Under its standard gather violence, malignity, rage, fraud, perfidy, rapacity, and lust. If it only slew man, it would do little. It turns man into a beast of prey.”
William Ellery Channing (1780 – 1842), American Unitarian minister
* * * * * * * * *
We all know war is hell, and we all feel when we are engaged in war we are on the right side, fighting for peace and freedom. This implies that we are different than our enemies. We have a higher purpose and that purpose is to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. War is ugly, however, and it makes people enmeshed in war ugly for the attention, as brutality can, often does possess the victors as well as the vanquished, as part of the spoils of war.
Our fourth president, James Madison (1751 – 1836), perhaps the least known of the Founding Fathers, and a framer of the Federal constitution along with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, once said:
“Of all the evils to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies and debts, and taxes, are the known instruments for bringing the many under the dominion of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended; its influences in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people! No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
These words and those of Reverend Channing come to mind in reading of another war, the cruel Allied occupation of Giles MacDonogh’s carefully researched book, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (Basic Books 2007).
We have had a scattering of reported brutalities by the Coalition Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, but this study of the Allied occupation of Germany immediately following World War II has the leavening effect of more than sixty years. It indicates that to the victors may go the spoils, but often the brutality differs little with that perceived as formerly germane only to the enemy, in this case, the Nazis.
In the spring of 1945, Germany went down into chaos and defeat, and became an occupied territory by its enemies. Many Germans were consigned to slave labor, concentration camps, starvation, or imprisonment without charge. Nor did executions disappear with the defeat of the Nazis. Jews and others so incarcerated were liberated, but such prisons as Bergen-Belsen now housed German citizens and former German soldiers.
As early as 1943, the Allies had set their sights on unconditional German surrender, but on June 5, 1944, when it was administered with much military pomp, there was no German government, making the document of doubtful legality.
It went beyond that. The United States, Great Britain and Russia summarily divided Germany into occupied territories or military governance zones, eventually including France. At the same time, Germans, who had lived for generations in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia, were to be repatriated in an orderly and humane manner back into Germany over a five-year period. It didn’t happen like this, as Giles MacDonogh documents in this stunning story.
The innocent always experience the collateral damage of war. The native population turns on its former German masters by committing rape, murder and pillage of its German-speaking neighbors who are now persona non grata. The natives do this with impunity while failing to realize their neighbors are as much victims as they are. Entire communities of Germans, who had lived outside the Reich, often for generations, were uprooted at gunpoint. In the end, 16 million people were expelled from their homes.
Robbed, beaten, starved, old men, women, and children were forced to march westward, or crammed into cattle cars in which they sometimes froze to death. MacDonogh takes the reader along on these fearful journeys, village by village, describing the hideous migration.
These displaced German-speakers arrived in their “homeland” already swollen with millions of rootless people. At the same time, the Wehrmacht, the beaten German army of millions, were forced to wait in literally cages to be discharged.
During the war, 11 million German soldiers had been captured. Seven and half million were in the hands of the Western Allies, five million of whom were released within a year. One and a half million disappeared in Soviet Russia and countries of the East. In the spring of 1945, some 40,000 prisoners died of hunger and exposure in twelve open camps that Americans set up to contain a million men.
Almost immediately after the war, the Cold War commenced with Soviet Russia. Direct Interrogation Centers were set up throughout the American and British zones to drill ex-POW, where appalling brutality was justified to extract critical information regarding Russian espionage, mirroring in many cases practices formerly used by the Nazis.
As these notorious methods started to leak to the press, however, especially of the Bad Nenndorf Center in the British Zone, pressure was put to desist with such practices. Eventually, Bad Nenndorf and other like centers were closed. Attempts to bring charges against personnel guilty of brutality in these centers fizzled, as the media tired of the reporting.
The US Army did not want to hold on to prisoners of war, or for it to get out that they were being used as forced labor. That would not be well received in the United States. The British, however, were convinced this was fair reparation for the incessant Nazis V-2 rocket attacks on England during the war. Besides, England needed about half a million former German prisoners to work mainly in agriculture.
Before being transferred to Great Britain, these “POW’s,” even though the war was over, were held in “POW” camps in Germany and Belgium to await deportation. Conditions in these camps were appalling. German ex-soldiers, who knew how to run such camps, were put in charge. They were brutal to their former mates-in-arms. They hoarded the food, the bedding, blankets and even clothes the British dispense for the camps. Men slept on straw and shivered some literally to death. Only four electric light bulbs were in one entire camp with no soap or towels with as many as five hundred men having to share a single washroom.
To give you a sense of the paranoia at the time, Stalin thought the Four Powers were creating a new German army to fight against the Soviet Union, and so he opposed any capitulation.
Once the Allies adopted a blueprint for occupied governance, the first order of business was to erase Nazi government and Nazi law from the books, and exclude Nazi Party members from any chance of power in public office or top positions in finance, industry, commerce, agriculture, education, publishing, and the press. The Allies soon realized that “nominal members of the Party” should not be excluded because with such exclusion, few were qualified or experienced to run operations. So, from the very beginning, a wink and a promise as well as expediency became the order of the day.
In this fractured society, decimated and demoralized, the haves and haves nothing spawned corruption, looting, the black market, false documents and an endless noir worthy of spy fiction. Moreover, the absence of so many men for so long by death or imprisonment created a social and moral vacuum. Women, now the chief breadwinners for their families, would do whatever was necessary to keep their families intact. It became common for women to exchange a PX package for sex or cigarettes without any compunction or social alarm.
The German population was not only homeless but also hungry. The near starvation of the German people was not deliberate, although many Germans thought it was. It was part of a pattern. The area controlled by the Soviets possessed the rich farmlands. Under the reparation arrangements, Russia was obliged to send food to the West. It never did.
The Allies were on the horns of a dilemma. They had to feed the Germans or get out, and getting out now was thought to mean letting the Russians in. Then the bitterest winter in a hundred years hit Germany in 1946 – 1947. Northern German waterways were frozen for months. With little food or fuel, freezing to death became common. Yet the Allies, especially Great Britain, considered it “not our problem.” The British were bitter. They felt Germany deserved the punishment, and unlike the Americans, they had no intentions of rebuilding German industry.
This did not make sense to Germans. Heavy machinery vital to reconstruction was being demolished. Men were thrown out of industrial work with no prospect for reemployment. It appeared that the Allies were bent on reducing Germany to an agrarian society. Winston Churchill, who was at first not opposed to such draconian measures, was finally appalled at what he saw:
“We cannot afford, nor can the United States, to let chaos and misery continue indefinitely in our Zones of Germany. The idea of keeping millions of people hanging about in a sub-human state between earth and hell, until they are worn down to a slave condition or embrace Communism, will only breed at least a moral pestilence and probably an actual war. Let Germany live!”
Following this, the Americans and British fused their two zones economically and issued a new currency. The Russians retaliated by blockading supplies to the Western sector of Berlin. The famous “Berlin Airlift” followed. It not only provided food and staples through the air for the suffering Berliners, but also turned the focus to the intrinsic spirit of goodness of both countries. It was their finest hour as many have said, and has proven a bonding of the German spirit to the West to this day.
As MacDonogh explains in this book:
“Friends of mine have often told me that the Germans deserved what they got in 1945: it was a just punishment for their behavior in occupied lands and for the treatment of the Jews at home. This book is not intended to excuse the Germans, but it does not hesitate to expose the victorious Allies in their treatment of the enemy at the peace, for in most cases it was not the criminals who were raped, starved, tortured or bludgeoned to death but women, children, and old men. What I record and sometimes call into question here is the way that many people were allowed to exact that revenge by military commanders, even by government ministers, and that when they did so they often killed the innocent, not the guilty. The real murderers all too often died in their beds.”
It is unsettling to read that countries can carry grudges and vengeance in their hearts the same as individuals; that man’s inhumanity to man is not isolated to one people, but part of the fabric of mankind. The reader may be numbed by such an account, or he may be incredulous to its veracity. It is offered here in my continuing reminder of my own book, A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, which closes here with the words of the Spanish philosopher George Santayana (1863 – 1952), who reminded us “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
Dr. Fisher’s latest book is A Look Back to See Ahead (AuthorHouse 2007). See www.authorhouse.com.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
THE DEATH OF THE CORPORATION?
DEATH OF THE CORPORATION?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2007
“The era of the free lunch has ended. The twentieth century, which began with such paternalistic control and obedience in America, has run amuck. Now nothing and no one is in control. Take corporate America. Any large company today is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation. The pendulum of centralization-decentralization is more a yo-yo contest with no clear winners, only painfully confused losers. Trauma is written on the face of America enterprise.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1990).
“The bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its morality and blind stupidity.”
Carl Jung
“Insanity is rare among individuals, but is common among the group.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
* * * * * * * * *
Forty years ago John Kenneth Galbraith argued in “The New Industrial State” (1967) with his typical confidence that corporations were no longer limited to railroads, steel making and oil refining, but would embrace everything getting bigger and bigger with no end in sight.
Then the other day the UAW settled with General Motors after a strike of only 48 hours. The UAW, which is a corporate mirror image of GM, has been reduced from more than 400,000 members to 73,000, while GM, which once owned more than 50 percent of the American automotive business now has been reduced to 24 percent and declining. This is not a mirage but an inevitable trend.
The 1970 strike lasted two months during which the national unemployment rate rose to 5.5 percent and the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the quarter dropped from 2.5 to 1.4 percent. Of course, in 1970, GM was the nation’s largest corporation, hugely profitable, and did, as it desired. But in the last two years, GM lost $12 billion.
It was apparent 20 years ago when I was working for Honeywell Europe Ltd. out of Brussels that the compartmentalization with only a few knowing how all the pieces fit together, and therefore the ticket to their security and control, was unraveling. The corporation, which was always a myth, was dying.
As touched upon earlier, the UAW is a carbon copy of GM. “We are the architects of the future,” declared Walter Reuther, UAW president from 1946 until his death in the spring of 1970. He was echoing the sentiments of Charles Wilson, CEO of GM in the 1950s, who proclaimed, “As GM goes so goes the United States.” The combination of GM’s jazzy business model of planned obsolescence and the UAW contract demands for increasing entitlements led to inflation, massive job losses in the early 1980s, opened the door for Toyota and other non-U.S. companies. Corporate bigness was no longer better. It turns out that market competition punishes those firms whose costs are out of line with others. But the problem is not limited to profit and lost statements.
We have seen recent evidence of how corporate compartmentalization breaks down with the Iraq war with a bunch of renegade security brigands called “Black Water” performing as if in a Wild West show, only with real bullets.
The State Department, which is supposed to be Black Water’s ultimate authority, was seem mumbling incoherently before a congressional panel. Then of course there is Katrina and now Home Land Security and FEMA handled that. Corporate society is not a 300-pound guerilla, but an erector set of anomalous parts produced by a machine mentality.
Most interesting in this myth making is the Dow Jones Industrials. The press applauds the Dow Jones Industrials as a measure of the health of the economy, disregarding the plunging dollar and the sub prime real-estate fiasco. After all, what does a “breakthrough” to 14,000 mean to the fatigued legs of American economy? The answer is less than you might think. It reflects a global economy that still supports the American economy by frenzy if not frantic financial speculation on the stock market.
Small wonder casinos have become a barometer of the American psyche pox marking the land from coast-to-coast and border-to-border. The stock market is less of an investment than it is a gamble, like casinos. To bet big you have to be able to withstand big losses, as most bets don’t win.
Even the word “economy” is misleading. It creates the impression of a homogenous entity when it is only the daily sum of all economic transactions that take place. The irony is that most businesses in America do not have stocks. The “economy” might be hot in one section of the country and cold in another. People will think it is good if they have jobs; bad if they are laid off. Put another way, the economy, if it has any meaning at all, is always local.
Twenty years ago I wrote of an economic holocaust as corporate jackals swept down on Safeway Stores, Inc. with a hostile takeover with a “Leverage Buy Out” (LBO). More than 63,000 employees were cut loose through store closings with those still retained earning only one-third of their formal salary or hourly wage. Meanwhile, senior management, and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), LBO specialists, earned millions. This quick kill corporate strategy became common fare. It continues today but no longer has the shock value, as it is now part of the pathology of normalcy.
It is so easy to misread our history. Corporate America believed the reason it became so big and powerful was not only because of its resources and resourcefulness, but because it was right, and our culture and products were right for the world. After all, we broke an entire ideology not with a nuclear bomb but by the sheer energy and brutality of economic numbers. We forced the Soviet Union to play our game and bankrupted it. We discovered we could invade a country without physically going into its territory. We could dictate unconditional terms without appearing anything other than a force for the good. Corporate capitalism has turned this game on its own people. It brings workers under control by giving them the illusion of freedom and choice while forcing them to adhere to its rigid principles, which can be resisted only at the cost of one’s career or job security. There is no Gestapo, no torture chamber. It’s perfect. We might call it “corporate lite.”
But it is in trouble and the evidence is everywhere. In fact, I’ve been writing about it for years, starting with the changing nature of the workforce, the changing nature of work, the changing seat of power from the privilege few in position power to the informed many in knowledge power, from the failure to buy or bribe productivity through entitlements, from the emergence of the Internet, from the failure of education and religion to escape the corporate net, and on and on.
The greatest talent of the corporation is the art of presentation. Truth, fact and reality are Play-doh in the hands of corporate CEOs. We’ve seen this dramatized with tobacco company executives appearing before a congressional committee stating emphatically that smoking was not addictive. Yet, corporate research, at the time, of which all were aware, definitively pointed to the fact that it was. We see it with pharmaceutical executives, the American Medical Association, and nearly every other corporate body you can think of, who have mastered the art of presentation to keep 300 million Americans in somnolent comfort.
Now, everything is globalization, which is another corporate myth. Global trading is no different than it every was, only accelerated as the world shrinks. People in one country have always traded with people in another. The Earth is, in fact, not flat although a clever globetrotting journalist, and multinational corporations, continue to peddle the myth. They believe they can turn Earth into one giant plantation owned and managed by them.
But their day is past. Corporate America, and its imitators, is bleeding the earth dry. We are living in the twilight of the Euro-American domination. This is not a new theme or an original thought. But the evidence continues to suggest that we will not wake up to understand the motivation of our enemies by simply calling them “evil.” It suggests that our enemies know us better than we know ourselves. They understand what has made our society sick – our demand for outstanding presentation and need to see ourselves as number one.
No society has ever been destroyed from without before it was first destroyed from within. Our enemies are often close to home in the guise of corporate do-gooders and not some vague amorphous ill-defined group that terrorizes us from afar. Yes, terrorists, too, do exist, but the terror at home is self-generating. It finds us going to seed through self-indulgence, luxurious living, and denial. You can paper over reality but you cannot change it, and what is real is what is happening to you in your community with or without your involvement right now. Everyone is a leader or no one is. If you believe otherwise, then you have probably come to accept the corporate myth as real.
___________
Dr. Fisher’s most recent book is A Look Back To See Ahead (AuthorHouse 2007).
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2007
“The era of the free lunch has ended. The twentieth century, which began with such paternalistic control and obedience in America, has run amuck. Now nothing and no one is in control. Take corporate America. Any large company today is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation. The pendulum of centralization-decentralization is more a yo-yo contest with no clear winners, only painfully confused losers. Trauma is written on the face of America enterprise.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1990).
“The bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its morality and blind stupidity.”
Carl Jung
“Insanity is rare among individuals, but is common among the group.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
* * * * * * * * *
Forty years ago John Kenneth Galbraith argued in “The New Industrial State” (1967) with his typical confidence that corporations were no longer limited to railroads, steel making and oil refining, but would embrace everything getting bigger and bigger with no end in sight.
Then the other day the UAW settled with General Motors after a strike of only 48 hours. The UAW, which is a corporate mirror image of GM, has been reduced from more than 400,000 members to 73,000, while GM, which once owned more than 50 percent of the American automotive business now has been reduced to 24 percent and declining. This is not a mirage but an inevitable trend.
The 1970 strike lasted two months during which the national unemployment rate rose to 5.5 percent and the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the quarter dropped from 2.5 to 1.4 percent. Of course, in 1970, GM was the nation’s largest corporation, hugely profitable, and did, as it desired. But in the last two years, GM lost $12 billion.
It was apparent 20 years ago when I was working for Honeywell Europe Ltd. out of Brussels that the compartmentalization with only a few knowing how all the pieces fit together, and therefore the ticket to their security and control, was unraveling. The corporation, which was always a myth, was dying.
As touched upon earlier, the UAW is a carbon copy of GM. “We are the architects of the future,” declared Walter Reuther, UAW president from 1946 until his death in the spring of 1970. He was echoing the sentiments of Charles Wilson, CEO of GM in the 1950s, who proclaimed, “As GM goes so goes the United States.” The combination of GM’s jazzy business model of planned obsolescence and the UAW contract demands for increasing entitlements led to inflation, massive job losses in the early 1980s, opened the door for Toyota and other non-U.S. companies. Corporate bigness was no longer better. It turns out that market competition punishes those firms whose costs are out of line with others. But the problem is not limited to profit and lost statements.
We have seen recent evidence of how corporate compartmentalization breaks down with the Iraq war with a bunch of renegade security brigands called “Black Water” performing as if in a Wild West show, only with real bullets.
The State Department, which is supposed to be Black Water’s ultimate authority, was seem mumbling incoherently before a congressional panel. Then of course there is Katrina and now Home Land Security and FEMA handled that. Corporate society is not a 300-pound guerilla, but an erector set of anomalous parts produced by a machine mentality.
Most interesting in this myth making is the Dow Jones Industrials. The press applauds the Dow Jones Industrials as a measure of the health of the economy, disregarding the plunging dollar and the sub prime real-estate fiasco. After all, what does a “breakthrough” to 14,000 mean to the fatigued legs of American economy? The answer is less than you might think. It reflects a global economy that still supports the American economy by frenzy if not frantic financial speculation on the stock market.
Small wonder casinos have become a barometer of the American psyche pox marking the land from coast-to-coast and border-to-border. The stock market is less of an investment than it is a gamble, like casinos. To bet big you have to be able to withstand big losses, as most bets don’t win.
Even the word “economy” is misleading. It creates the impression of a homogenous entity when it is only the daily sum of all economic transactions that take place. The irony is that most businesses in America do not have stocks. The “economy” might be hot in one section of the country and cold in another. People will think it is good if they have jobs; bad if they are laid off. Put another way, the economy, if it has any meaning at all, is always local.
Twenty years ago I wrote of an economic holocaust as corporate jackals swept down on Safeway Stores, Inc. with a hostile takeover with a “Leverage Buy Out” (LBO). More than 63,000 employees were cut loose through store closings with those still retained earning only one-third of their formal salary or hourly wage. Meanwhile, senior management, and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), LBO specialists, earned millions. This quick kill corporate strategy became common fare. It continues today but no longer has the shock value, as it is now part of the pathology of normalcy.
It is so easy to misread our history. Corporate America believed the reason it became so big and powerful was not only because of its resources and resourcefulness, but because it was right, and our culture and products were right for the world. After all, we broke an entire ideology not with a nuclear bomb but by the sheer energy and brutality of economic numbers. We forced the Soviet Union to play our game and bankrupted it. We discovered we could invade a country without physically going into its territory. We could dictate unconditional terms without appearing anything other than a force for the good. Corporate capitalism has turned this game on its own people. It brings workers under control by giving them the illusion of freedom and choice while forcing them to adhere to its rigid principles, which can be resisted only at the cost of one’s career or job security. There is no Gestapo, no torture chamber. It’s perfect. We might call it “corporate lite.”
But it is in trouble and the evidence is everywhere. In fact, I’ve been writing about it for years, starting with the changing nature of the workforce, the changing nature of work, the changing seat of power from the privilege few in position power to the informed many in knowledge power, from the failure to buy or bribe productivity through entitlements, from the emergence of the Internet, from the failure of education and religion to escape the corporate net, and on and on.
The greatest talent of the corporation is the art of presentation. Truth, fact and reality are Play-doh in the hands of corporate CEOs. We’ve seen this dramatized with tobacco company executives appearing before a congressional committee stating emphatically that smoking was not addictive. Yet, corporate research, at the time, of which all were aware, definitively pointed to the fact that it was. We see it with pharmaceutical executives, the American Medical Association, and nearly every other corporate body you can think of, who have mastered the art of presentation to keep 300 million Americans in somnolent comfort.
Now, everything is globalization, which is another corporate myth. Global trading is no different than it every was, only accelerated as the world shrinks. People in one country have always traded with people in another. The Earth is, in fact, not flat although a clever globetrotting journalist, and multinational corporations, continue to peddle the myth. They believe they can turn Earth into one giant plantation owned and managed by them.
But their day is past. Corporate America, and its imitators, is bleeding the earth dry. We are living in the twilight of the Euro-American domination. This is not a new theme or an original thought. But the evidence continues to suggest that we will not wake up to understand the motivation of our enemies by simply calling them “evil.” It suggests that our enemies know us better than we know ourselves. They understand what has made our society sick – our demand for outstanding presentation and need to see ourselves as number one.
No society has ever been destroyed from without before it was first destroyed from within. Our enemies are often close to home in the guise of corporate do-gooders and not some vague amorphous ill-defined group that terrorizes us from afar. Yes, terrorists, too, do exist, but the terror at home is self-generating. It finds us going to seed through self-indulgence, luxurious living, and denial. You can paper over reality but you cannot change it, and what is real is what is happening to you in your community with or without your involvement right now. Everyone is a leader or no one is. If you believe otherwise, then you have probably come to accept the corporate myth as real.
___________
Dr. Fisher’s most recent book is A Look Back To See Ahead (AuthorHouse 2007).
Monday, October 01, 2007
WHEN THE READER IS READY -- Radio Interview with Dr. Fisher
WHEN THE READER IS READY, THE TEACHER WILL ARRIVE!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 2007
Reference: Interview of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. by David Vickers, KROS (am) radio, Clinton, Iowa, September 11, 2007
David Vickers (DV): Good morning, nice to see you in Clinton again.
Dr. Fisher (DF): Good to be here.
DV: You’re here to promote your new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. How has the reception been?
DF: Most generous as usual. Clinton is most generous to us that move on and do other things.
DV: This is going to be an extended interview. Does that suit you?
DF: Fine.
DV: Good. You write that two common themes are central to your books: the primacy of intellectual capital and the idea of authority. Could you explain those themes?
DF: I’d be glad to. Take the idea of American democracy and free enterprise. They are ideas in progress, and like all ideas, subject to challenge, refinement and periodic reassessment. They flourish and then falter, and even appear at times threatened with extinction. Ideas are abstract but just as real as any organic thing. We know some species of animals are constantly threatened; so are ideas.
DV: And intellectual capital?
DF: It is just as vulnerable. My da once told me they can take the ground out from under your feet, the clothes off your back, and the roof over your head, but they have to kill you to take from you what you put between your two ears. He had only a seventh grade education, but I’ve never been able to trump his wisdom.
DV: Is that why you are so passionate about writing?
DF: Does anyone understand passion? Since a little boy, I’ve been curious and a wonderer. Education was a way of moving beyond my roots, but in a sense I’ve never left them. I can’t explain my passion but I’ve always been a visualizer, a dreamer if you will, finding kindred spirits in books. This led to writing poetry, and little essays to myself, which triggered something else.
DV: Such as?
DF: I don’t know how to identify it precisely. I’ve always been big for my age, and empathetic with the little guy. I would get angry if I saw or experienced injustice, or bullying. It started when I was quite young and has become a constant with me throughout my schooling and working life. I don’t like to see physical, social, or intellectual bullying. I’ve learned to sublimate my anger into words and ideas, many of which have never seen the light of day. I was an angry young man. Now, I suppose I am an angry old man.
DV: How do you feel about that?
DF: (He laughs) About being angry? It’s my motivator. It’s not that I see something nobody else does, but others feel they have too big a stake in a job, career, marriage, or community to state how they think and feel. I’ve never had that problem. It is why these two themes have crystallized into books and articles. I am speaking for the timid.
DV: You’ve written nine books and some 300 articles, right? But you got a rather late start wouldn’t you say?
DF: Yes, I didn’t write my first book until I returned from a corporate assignment in South Africa for Nalco Chemical Company.
DV: That would be CONFIDENT SELLING (Prentice-Hall 1970). How does that relate to your two themes?
DF: I was trained as a chemist, started out in R&D for Standard Brands, Inc., and joined Nalco only to make enough money to supplement a graduate fellowship to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut in pursuit of a doctorate in theoretical chemistry. I had two children at the time, and when another was on the way, I had to make my job with Nalco work. I had no training in sales techniques; only technical training in Nalco’s specialty chemical products. It wasn’t long before I found that Nalco sales engineers attempted to wow customers with their technical know how without understanding the customer’s needs. This made me wonder. I concluded they were afraid to sell because it was demeaning of their engineering prowess. The barrier was not the buyer but the seller. I formulated my own way past this barrier to see the customer as he was.
DV: How did you do this?
DF: Prentice-Hall would ask me the same question many years later when it decided to publish CONFIDENT SELLING. I discovered if I accept myself as I am, warts and all, then I cannot help but accept the customer as he is without prejudice. It is like an invitation into the customer’s mind as he is naked before you.
DV: How did CONFIDENT SELLING sell?
DF: It was in print for twenty years, serialized in a national magazine, and approached six figures in sales over its duration. A consortium wanted to produce a film and audiocassette of the book, but Prentice-Hall made such contractual demands that they dropped out of negotiations. I would never forget this. Prentice-Hall owned the copyright, which meant I had no voice in the decision.
DV: Is that why there was a twenty-year gap before you published your next book?
DF: Not really. I found CONFIDENT SELLING was a lark, that what I was writing was not mature or commercial enough for a publisher to take a chance. I wrote a book on my view of the Roman Catholic Church titled “The Silent Man in the Pew Speaks Out.” Paulist Press looked at it but declined. Then I went back to school to earn a Ph.D. in organization-industrial psychology for the next six years, consulting on the side, although now with a family of four children. In 1980, after ten years of consulting, I joined Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida as an organizational development (OD) psychologist. Once again, I was promoted to a corporate executive position as director of human resources planning & development for Honeywell Europe, Ltd. It was the fruition of my work on four continents for Nalco, plus ten years of consulting, and now working for Honeywell Europe during the infancy of the European Economic Community (EEC) that I was moved once again to write a book.
DV: That would be WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES. It took off if my memory serves me right.
DF: Yes and no. I self-published remembering my experience with Prentice-Hall, but learned a hard lesson. There is a lot more to publishing than writing.
DV: In that book you said entitlements were set to doom the Fortune 500 companies because they weren’t tied to performance.
DF: Yes, I did.
DV: And they have.
DF: Unfortunately.
DV: You also said companies were in a state of panic as foreign competition made inroads into their markets, going from unconscious incompetence and comfort to conscious incompetence and complacency as they attempted to bribe and buy worker contribution.
DF: Yes.
DV: Why did you say that? Didn’t you know it would make you look like a hot head?
DF: I could see workers were slipping from management dependency to a counterdependence on the company for their total well being; that workers were more interested in what they could get than give, while management was chasing greed because they could. Enterprise had been reduced to chaos fueling the decline.
DV: You also said human resources was management’s union.
DF: Yes, I did. I could see where HR had become complicit in this affair, failing to alert management to the changing character of the workforce and the nature of work.
DV: But as shocking as that was you said something even more shocking.
DF: What was that?
DV: You claimed Total Quality Management (TQM) was a charade, that GM was playing quick and dirty with it, sounding the rhetoric but when push came to shove always meeting schedule at any price. You gave case after case to document your charges.
DF: Yes, I guess I did.
DV: Why call it a charade?
DF: That’s your word, not mine. I said that it was apparent corporate America didn’t believe in quality management. It wasn’t part of its liturgy; meeting schedule was.
DV: You also said the reason the Japanese were eating our lunch was because our experts were ignored in the United States, and had to go to Japan to find work.
DF: You’re referring to J. M. Juran, W. Edwards Deming, and Peter Drucker. Yes, I said that, too.
DV: Did WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS get much attention?
DF: NPR’s “All Things Considered” gave it airtime; so did The Wall Street Journal, Industry Week, and The Business Book Review Journal. Industry Week named it a top ten business book but said it was an angry book. Business Book Review said it was one of the top four business books of the year, and that it would change management practices. Now, nearly twenty years later, it is re-releasing a review claiming it is one of the most prophetic business books in the past fifty years.
DV: Whatever became of that book?
DF: It is still in print; let me put it that way.
DV: That didn’t seem to discourage you as you came out with THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN next. Why so?
DF: It was directed at professional workers. I could see that they had failed to see their time had come.
DV: Why professional workers; why not all workers?
DF: Professional workers were becoming essentially all workers and key to getting things done in the organization. Making things has never been our long suit and many countries do a better job of it than we do, but in the creation of things we have no peer. Management, you see, is no longer important as once perceived. Power has shifted from position power to knowledge power, and professionals possess that power, not management.
DV: How is that supposed to work?
DF: Let’s just say, “It’s in the book.”
DV: Your next book CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. What was that book about?
DF: It built on the earlier success of CONFIDENT SELLING, but now made a claim that everyone was in the selling business and no one more so than professionals. Yet, they had no idea how to sell their ideas. On the other hand, everything written on how to become successful dealt with some aspect of manipulation or intimidation. In fact one book of the 1970s celebrated winning through intimidation. My book argued that the only person you have to sell to be successful is yourself. Once done the rest follows. You have penetrated the ultimate barrier and will now see others clearly because you see yourself clearly. Simple? Perhaps, but difficult to achieve. So, the reason for the book.
DV: Em. Then you went on to write a book that we were all rearing our children to be self-haters?
DF: You’re referring to THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND. You state it a rather strongly but however accurately. I wrote an article for The Reader’s Digest which opened with the line, “To have a friend, you must be a friend, starting with yourself.” Reader’s Digest informed me that a request for more than 25,000 reprints was received the following weeks of publication. That was my invitation to write the book.
DV: That sounds like pretty strong stuff.
DF: Well, it is. People are looking for friends and identity in all the wrong places, painting their bodies with tattoos, and retrogressing back to primitives, trying desperately to draw attention to themselves because they need such confirmation to prove they exist. I could see why.
DV: How has that book been received?
DF (Smiles) People read it looking for answers, looking for ways to be more self-assertive, for how to deal with others without first dealing with themselves. Some readers have become angry because it is not a “how to” or “quick fix” book. Such readers are looking for mechanics, for solutions without understanding they are the problem. The book was written for them to unravel their hang-ups and angst, and redefine their situations in more realistic terms. That apparently is not too interesting. I have a line in the book, “The more you do for others the less they do for themselves; the less they do for themselves the weaker they become, and the more they resent you for your attention.” My premise is that readers are the authority to their own solutions. The problem appears they are too busy or too distracted to realize it.
DV: Is that how you have come to give us the tag that we are a solution driven society?
DF: Perhaps.
DV: You next came out with SIX SILENT KILLERS: MANAGEMENT’S GREATEST CHALLENGE. What is that all about?
DF: It was about the fact that the shift from 90 percent blue-collar to 90 percent white-collar or professionals in most Fortune 500 companies has resulted in a new pathology because the transformation has been largely ignored or treated with hubristic arrogance. I identify these behaviors as social termites that silently destroy the infrastructure of the organization only to be discovered when it is too late for damage control. These silent killers are professionals sitting on their hands feeling they aren’t recognized or appreciated for who and what they are.
DV: What can explain such behavior?
DF: Professionals don’t want to take on power or its responsibility. They want only the perks of power. So, when these are denied, they become dissident and retreat into six silent behaviors.
DV: Such as?
DF: Passive aggression – coming in late and leaving early, doing as little as possible to get by; passive responsive – never doing anything until told what to do, doing it even if it is wrong, bringing their bodies to work and leaving their minds at home; passive defensive – always having a ready excuse for why something isn’t done or done on time; approach avoidance – accepting assignments they have no plans to complete or complete on time; obsessive compulsive – being obsessed with what they don’t have at the expense of what they do, always seeing the grass greener on the other side of the tracks; and malicious obedience – withholding valuable information critical to a project, spreading disinformation, or hiding information from those who need it.
DV: Wow! How has that book done?
DF: The Wall Street Journal said every executive in America should read it.
DV: Have they?
DF: Not hardly. It’s still in print; let me put it that way.
DV: Then you came out with CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERS & DISSONANT WORKERS. What’s that about?
DF: Each of my books builds on the premise of intellectual capital and the idea of authority. This book looked beyond the palpable corporate greed so widely reported to the failure of senior management to solve the complex problems it faced, instead concerning itself only with problems it could solve, putting a good cosmetic face on its watch while throwing the organization into chaos. Professionals demonstrated their angst with the six silent behaviors. Both failed to realize they were committing corporate sin, killing the spirit of work while seriously jeopardizing operational success.
DV: Did you offer any solutions?
DF: (Smiles) As a matter of fact, I did going against my own grain. I presented a blueprint for getting out of the rut.
DV: How has that book done?
DF: Let’s just say it is still in print.
DV: Now you come out with A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, but not before you write a novel.
DF: Yes to both. The novel was actually a memoir written as a novel titled IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE. I wanted to go back to my adolescence during WWII to show when our moral compass was firmly in place and we weren’t ambivalent about our identity. Everything worked for us then because it wasn’t all about “us,” but about the collective challenges we faced during that war. More than fifty years later, I see us no longer happy campers. We have lost our moral compass and our way.
DV: So you say, but who is listening? Why don’t you just give it up and go quietly into the sunset and enjoy your remaining years?
DF: I suppose I could, but we all have a purpose in life and this is mine. A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is the distillate of that process.
DV: What do you expect from this book?
DF: I don’t expect anything. I think I’ve made that clear.
DV: So why are you on a book tour?
DF: Good point. Why, indeed. The short answer is because it is necessary. I am not a celebrity personality or a national best selling author, yet I believe I’m saying some relevant things helpful in promoting the dialogue. I have a problem with our thinking and our problem solving strategy. In the most common language, I point out how our present approach to problem solving is doomed to failure, as countless events prove again and again. Since we can’t solve the problems crippling us, we solve the problems we can. This keeps us stuck.
DV: So it’s a book about problems?
DF: You could say that.
DV: But I don’t see your point.
DF: The point is we reject complexity because it is overwhelming. Instead, we manufacture solutions and declare war on our vices without ever clearly defining them. We have an appetite for violence and so declare war on our vices. We have a war on obesity, war on poverty, war on drug abuse, war on terror, war on promiscuity, war on greed, war on corruption, failing to realize in everyone of these wars we are failing, stuck, because buried in the violence is the actual cause. We fail to look at the problem from a complementary vantage point of vertical and lateral thinking, but exclusively in terms to top down vertical thinking with linear logic, cause & effect analysis, dividing the problem into manageable pieces, and then putting it back together as the solution. This is critical thinking or thinking in terms of what is already known without the complement of creative thinking, or what is not known, but can be found out. Creative thinking is mainly bottom up thinking or lateral thinking, thinking that is holistic, counterintuitive and conceptual. Knowledge power is not the exclusive domain at the top of the hierarchy but in the middle and bottom of the organization as well. The organization must flatten out to garner the full advantage of its intellectual capital. Top down needs the complement of bottom up thinking. But there is a problem. It is our take on authority. For one, bottom up thinking doesn’t want to be tagged with the responsibility should something go wrong; and for another, it doesn’t know how to leverage its thinking to complement top down vertical thinking. Professionals are programmed, as are their blue-collar colleagues to be reactive, passive, submissive, and surrendering to the will of the organization.
DV: So what is the answer?
DF: The answer is not teaming, not working as a family, or some other patronizing dribble. The answer is counterintuitive. It is confrontation, conflict and creativity. Workers don’t have to love each other to work productively together. They need only to respect and accept each other as they are. Then they will confront and criticize each other honestly and timely when something goes wrong. They will do this frequently and politely, not infrequently and violently. Managed conflict is the glue that holds workers to the task at hand.
DV: Conflict and creativity. Could you say more?
DF: An organization that is hitting on all cylinders talks about real things to real people in real time. There are no favorites. When somebody sees something wrong, it is reported. The messenger isn’t killed. When workers have a problem with each other, it is managed, not avoided, ignored or denied. Studies have shown that when all elements of a system are working as well as they can, then the overall system is not. And the corollary, when the elements of the system are not performing as efficiently as they can, then the overall system is. This is counterintuitive but has proven to be the case. Competition between units is divisive; cooperation is uniting. Competition has proven the wrong motivating strategy. We have seen this again and again when every department reaches 100 percent of its goal while the company is failing.
DV: So what is the payoff of A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD?
DF: We don’t stay stuck. We don’t remain a sick society. We get on the same page and off on the same dime. We don’t retreat into oblivion. We don’t let the world take the game we invented away from us.
DV: That’s what you see happening?
DF: Oh, yes.
DV: Your evidence?
DF: I could simply say, “read the book,” but that would be a cop out. Evidence is everywhere. In the 1970s, we saw a paranoid president hunker down. He had been paranoid long before. Third in his class at law school at Duke University, he broke into the dean’s office to see his grades only to be caught. Watergate was anticlimactic. We saw it in the S&L banking scandal and in Enron. The recent sub-prime real-estate fiasco is anticlimactic to chronic cultural greed. Each episode has proven further evidence of a sick society, stuck and diminished, not only in our own eyes, but also in the eyes of the world. We argue that Viet Nam and Iraq are not the same, yet watch as Congress repeats the same histrionics. Then as now Congress continues to miss the changes, stays the same, and leaves the future up for grabs. We have failed to act effectively against this because we are caught up in the pathology of normalcy. We are stuck in WWII nostalgic hubris failing to see our descent is marked with a cultural plague. This plague is seen everywhere in colorful casinos across the land that produce nothing but feed misplaced dreams.
DV: They produce jobs, bring serious money into communities.
DF: But where does this money come from? It comes from people that can least afford it.
DV: You don’t know that for certain. Anyway, what will convince me to read A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD?
DF: I’m saying we have failed to look back and as a consequence have failed to see ahead. The evidence is everywhere but the reader must sense it. We are failing to see we are going the same way of the Greeks, Romans, Spanish, and English. We’re seeing the “American Century” sputtering to a whimpering end. We’re seeing all the resources that made us great now diminishing us because we haven’t paid attention.
DV: So this is a gloom and doom book.
DF: No. It is a kind of coming to Jesus meeting.
DV: That pretty stern stuff.
DF: Well, these are pretty trying times.
DV: Then would you say A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is uplifting?
DF: Let me put it this way, when I was a young man and came back from South Africa, where I experienced the ugliness of apartheid, I felt terrible because I could identify with the Afrikaners. The Boers, as they are known, are farmers like us, ordinary, conscientious, hard working, God fearing people. They created this monstrosity apartheid with four million whites governing 14 million Bantu or blacks. The majority population was without a vote, without rights or privileges, without freedom of speech, movement or association, yet these same Afrikaners felt they had done these people no harm. I saw this, experienced the benefits of it, me a simple man from Iowa of modest circumstances living the life of a colonial king, and it was too much.
DV: What did you do?
DF: I retired, took a two-year sabbatical, after which I went back to school looking for answers.
DV: Did you find them there?
DF: No, I found the university was another factory producing a product not unlike the products the corporation I had just left.
DV: That’s pretty critical. You’re kind of a serious dude. So, what do you expect to happen with this book?
DF: I hope something happens like it did to me when I returned to the United States from South Africa, and found myself in one of those little newspaper kiosks in New York City. I purchased a little book that changed my life. It was by Alan W. Watts and was titled simply, THE BOOK. I would like this book to do the same thing to someone else. When you write a book, you hope it touches a cord in the reader that hasn’t been touched before. That is my aim.
DV: But it sounds like a book more for academics. You’re smiling, why are you smiling?
DF: That is the easiest way to reject this book, to think that thinking is the exclusive domain of academics and specialists, not the general reader, not everyman and every woman. I am not an academic. I am a man of ideas that belongs to no coterie of elites, no special school of thought that can verify my pedigree as a qualified thinker. I am a man who grew up in the shadow of the courthouse, and ponders things because I can and because I must. Universities don’t have time for me.
DV: Why do you say that?
DF: I’m an outsider.
DV: You admit it.
DF: I cherish it. It gives me great freedom. I’m academically trained but not an academic. I’m a former corporate executive who has worked at every level of the organization from the lowest to the highest, and yet I’ve never joined the club. I’ve written nine books and hundreds of articles, yet I’m neither a journalist nor intellectual.
DV: So, you’re not a celebrity.
DF: No, I’m a voice in the wind, and a voice that will soon be leaving this town. Thank you very much.
_______________
Books mentioned in this interview are available on the Internet, from your favorite bookstore, or from http://www.fisherofideas.com/.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 2007
Reference: Interview of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. by David Vickers, KROS (am) radio, Clinton, Iowa, September 11, 2007
David Vickers (DV): Good morning, nice to see you in Clinton again.
Dr. Fisher (DF): Good to be here.
DV: You’re here to promote your new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. How has the reception been?
DF: Most generous as usual. Clinton is most generous to us that move on and do other things.
DV: This is going to be an extended interview. Does that suit you?
DF: Fine.
DV: Good. You write that two common themes are central to your books: the primacy of intellectual capital and the idea of authority. Could you explain those themes?
DF: I’d be glad to. Take the idea of American democracy and free enterprise. They are ideas in progress, and like all ideas, subject to challenge, refinement and periodic reassessment. They flourish and then falter, and even appear at times threatened with extinction. Ideas are abstract but just as real as any organic thing. We know some species of animals are constantly threatened; so are ideas.
DV: And intellectual capital?
DF: It is just as vulnerable. My da once told me they can take the ground out from under your feet, the clothes off your back, and the roof over your head, but they have to kill you to take from you what you put between your two ears. He had only a seventh grade education, but I’ve never been able to trump his wisdom.
DV: Is that why you are so passionate about writing?
DF: Does anyone understand passion? Since a little boy, I’ve been curious and a wonderer. Education was a way of moving beyond my roots, but in a sense I’ve never left them. I can’t explain my passion but I’ve always been a visualizer, a dreamer if you will, finding kindred spirits in books. This led to writing poetry, and little essays to myself, which triggered something else.
DV: Such as?
DF: I don’t know how to identify it precisely. I’ve always been big for my age, and empathetic with the little guy. I would get angry if I saw or experienced injustice, or bullying. It started when I was quite young and has become a constant with me throughout my schooling and working life. I don’t like to see physical, social, or intellectual bullying. I’ve learned to sublimate my anger into words and ideas, many of which have never seen the light of day. I was an angry young man. Now, I suppose I am an angry old man.
DV: How do you feel about that?
DF: (He laughs) About being angry? It’s my motivator. It’s not that I see something nobody else does, but others feel they have too big a stake in a job, career, marriage, or community to state how they think and feel. I’ve never had that problem. It is why these two themes have crystallized into books and articles. I am speaking for the timid.
DV: You’ve written nine books and some 300 articles, right? But you got a rather late start wouldn’t you say?
DF: Yes, I didn’t write my first book until I returned from a corporate assignment in South Africa for Nalco Chemical Company.
DV: That would be CONFIDENT SELLING (Prentice-Hall 1970). How does that relate to your two themes?
DF: I was trained as a chemist, started out in R&D for Standard Brands, Inc., and joined Nalco only to make enough money to supplement a graduate fellowship to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut in pursuit of a doctorate in theoretical chemistry. I had two children at the time, and when another was on the way, I had to make my job with Nalco work. I had no training in sales techniques; only technical training in Nalco’s specialty chemical products. It wasn’t long before I found that Nalco sales engineers attempted to wow customers with their technical know how without understanding the customer’s needs. This made me wonder. I concluded they were afraid to sell because it was demeaning of their engineering prowess. The barrier was not the buyer but the seller. I formulated my own way past this barrier to see the customer as he was.
DV: How did you do this?
DF: Prentice-Hall would ask me the same question many years later when it decided to publish CONFIDENT SELLING. I discovered if I accept myself as I am, warts and all, then I cannot help but accept the customer as he is without prejudice. It is like an invitation into the customer’s mind as he is naked before you.
DV: How did CONFIDENT SELLING sell?
DF: It was in print for twenty years, serialized in a national magazine, and approached six figures in sales over its duration. A consortium wanted to produce a film and audiocassette of the book, but Prentice-Hall made such contractual demands that they dropped out of negotiations. I would never forget this. Prentice-Hall owned the copyright, which meant I had no voice in the decision.
DV: Is that why there was a twenty-year gap before you published your next book?
DF: Not really. I found CONFIDENT SELLING was a lark, that what I was writing was not mature or commercial enough for a publisher to take a chance. I wrote a book on my view of the Roman Catholic Church titled “The Silent Man in the Pew Speaks Out.” Paulist Press looked at it but declined. Then I went back to school to earn a Ph.D. in organization-industrial psychology for the next six years, consulting on the side, although now with a family of four children. In 1980, after ten years of consulting, I joined Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida as an organizational development (OD) psychologist. Once again, I was promoted to a corporate executive position as director of human resources planning & development for Honeywell Europe, Ltd. It was the fruition of my work on four continents for Nalco, plus ten years of consulting, and now working for Honeywell Europe during the infancy of the European Economic Community (EEC) that I was moved once again to write a book.
DV: That would be WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES. It took off if my memory serves me right.
DF: Yes and no. I self-published remembering my experience with Prentice-Hall, but learned a hard lesson. There is a lot more to publishing than writing.
DV: In that book you said entitlements were set to doom the Fortune 500 companies because they weren’t tied to performance.
DF: Yes, I did.
DV: And they have.
DF: Unfortunately.
DV: You also said companies were in a state of panic as foreign competition made inroads into their markets, going from unconscious incompetence and comfort to conscious incompetence and complacency as they attempted to bribe and buy worker contribution.
DF: Yes.
DV: Why did you say that? Didn’t you know it would make you look like a hot head?
DF: I could see workers were slipping from management dependency to a counterdependence on the company for their total well being; that workers were more interested in what they could get than give, while management was chasing greed because they could. Enterprise had been reduced to chaos fueling the decline.
DV: You also said human resources was management’s union.
DF: Yes, I did. I could see where HR had become complicit in this affair, failing to alert management to the changing character of the workforce and the nature of work.
DV: But as shocking as that was you said something even more shocking.
DF: What was that?
DV: You claimed Total Quality Management (TQM) was a charade, that GM was playing quick and dirty with it, sounding the rhetoric but when push came to shove always meeting schedule at any price. You gave case after case to document your charges.
DF: Yes, I guess I did.
DV: Why call it a charade?
DF: That’s your word, not mine. I said that it was apparent corporate America didn’t believe in quality management. It wasn’t part of its liturgy; meeting schedule was.
DV: You also said the reason the Japanese were eating our lunch was because our experts were ignored in the United States, and had to go to Japan to find work.
DF: You’re referring to J. M. Juran, W. Edwards Deming, and Peter Drucker. Yes, I said that, too.
DV: Did WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS get much attention?
DF: NPR’s “All Things Considered” gave it airtime; so did The Wall Street Journal, Industry Week, and The Business Book Review Journal. Industry Week named it a top ten business book but said it was an angry book. Business Book Review said it was one of the top four business books of the year, and that it would change management practices. Now, nearly twenty years later, it is re-releasing a review claiming it is one of the most prophetic business books in the past fifty years.
DV: Whatever became of that book?
DF: It is still in print; let me put it that way.
DV: That didn’t seem to discourage you as you came out with THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN next. Why so?
DF: It was directed at professional workers. I could see that they had failed to see their time had come.
DV: Why professional workers; why not all workers?
DF: Professional workers were becoming essentially all workers and key to getting things done in the organization. Making things has never been our long suit and many countries do a better job of it than we do, but in the creation of things we have no peer. Management, you see, is no longer important as once perceived. Power has shifted from position power to knowledge power, and professionals possess that power, not management.
DV: How is that supposed to work?
DF: Let’s just say, “It’s in the book.”
DV: Your next book CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. What was that book about?
DF: It built on the earlier success of CONFIDENT SELLING, but now made a claim that everyone was in the selling business and no one more so than professionals. Yet, they had no idea how to sell their ideas. On the other hand, everything written on how to become successful dealt with some aspect of manipulation or intimidation. In fact one book of the 1970s celebrated winning through intimidation. My book argued that the only person you have to sell to be successful is yourself. Once done the rest follows. You have penetrated the ultimate barrier and will now see others clearly because you see yourself clearly. Simple? Perhaps, but difficult to achieve. So, the reason for the book.
DV: Em. Then you went on to write a book that we were all rearing our children to be self-haters?
DF: You’re referring to THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND. You state it a rather strongly but however accurately. I wrote an article for The Reader’s Digest which opened with the line, “To have a friend, you must be a friend, starting with yourself.” Reader’s Digest informed me that a request for more than 25,000 reprints was received the following weeks of publication. That was my invitation to write the book.
DV: That sounds like pretty strong stuff.
DF: Well, it is. People are looking for friends and identity in all the wrong places, painting their bodies with tattoos, and retrogressing back to primitives, trying desperately to draw attention to themselves because they need such confirmation to prove they exist. I could see why.
DV: How has that book been received?
DF (Smiles) People read it looking for answers, looking for ways to be more self-assertive, for how to deal with others without first dealing with themselves. Some readers have become angry because it is not a “how to” or “quick fix” book. Such readers are looking for mechanics, for solutions without understanding they are the problem. The book was written for them to unravel their hang-ups and angst, and redefine their situations in more realistic terms. That apparently is not too interesting. I have a line in the book, “The more you do for others the less they do for themselves; the less they do for themselves the weaker they become, and the more they resent you for your attention.” My premise is that readers are the authority to their own solutions. The problem appears they are too busy or too distracted to realize it.
DV: Is that how you have come to give us the tag that we are a solution driven society?
DF: Perhaps.
DV: You next came out with SIX SILENT KILLERS: MANAGEMENT’S GREATEST CHALLENGE. What is that all about?
DF: It was about the fact that the shift from 90 percent blue-collar to 90 percent white-collar or professionals in most Fortune 500 companies has resulted in a new pathology because the transformation has been largely ignored or treated with hubristic arrogance. I identify these behaviors as social termites that silently destroy the infrastructure of the organization only to be discovered when it is too late for damage control. These silent killers are professionals sitting on their hands feeling they aren’t recognized or appreciated for who and what they are.
DV: What can explain such behavior?
DF: Professionals don’t want to take on power or its responsibility. They want only the perks of power. So, when these are denied, they become dissident and retreat into six silent behaviors.
DV: Such as?
DF: Passive aggression – coming in late and leaving early, doing as little as possible to get by; passive responsive – never doing anything until told what to do, doing it even if it is wrong, bringing their bodies to work and leaving their minds at home; passive defensive – always having a ready excuse for why something isn’t done or done on time; approach avoidance – accepting assignments they have no plans to complete or complete on time; obsessive compulsive – being obsessed with what they don’t have at the expense of what they do, always seeing the grass greener on the other side of the tracks; and malicious obedience – withholding valuable information critical to a project, spreading disinformation, or hiding information from those who need it.
DV: Wow! How has that book done?
DF: The Wall Street Journal said every executive in America should read it.
DV: Have they?
DF: Not hardly. It’s still in print; let me put it that way.
DV: Then you came out with CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERS & DISSONANT WORKERS. What’s that about?
DF: Each of my books builds on the premise of intellectual capital and the idea of authority. This book looked beyond the palpable corporate greed so widely reported to the failure of senior management to solve the complex problems it faced, instead concerning itself only with problems it could solve, putting a good cosmetic face on its watch while throwing the organization into chaos. Professionals demonstrated their angst with the six silent behaviors. Both failed to realize they were committing corporate sin, killing the spirit of work while seriously jeopardizing operational success.
DV: Did you offer any solutions?
DF: (Smiles) As a matter of fact, I did going against my own grain. I presented a blueprint for getting out of the rut.
DV: How has that book done?
DF: Let’s just say it is still in print.
DV: Now you come out with A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, but not before you write a novel.
DF: Yes to both. The novel was actually a memoir written as a novel titled IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE. I wanted to go back to my adolescence during WWII to show when our moral compass was firmly in place and we weren’t ambivalent about our identity. Everything worked for us then because it wasn’t all about “us,” but about the collective challenges we faced during that war. More than fifty years later, I see us no longer happy campers. We have lost our moral compass and our way.
DV: So you say, but who is listening? Why don’t you just give it up and go quietly into the sunset and enjoy your remaining years?
DF: I suppose I could, but we all have a purpose in life and this is mine. A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is the distillate of that process.
DV: What do you expect from this book?
DF: I don’t expect anything. I think I’ve made that clear.
DV: So why are you on a book tour?
DF: Good point. Why, indeed. The short answer is because it is necessary. I am not a celebrity personality or a national best selling author, yet I believe I’m saying some relevant things helpful in promoting the dialogue. I have a problem with our thinking and our problem solving strategy. In the most common language, I point out how our present approach to problem solving is doomed to failure, as countless events prove again and again. Since we can’t solve the problems crippling us, we solve the problems we can. This keeps us stuck.
DV: So it’s a book about problems?
DF: You could say that.
DV: But I don’t see your point.
DF: The point is we reject complexity because it is overwhelming. Instead, we manufacture solutions and declare war on our vices without ever clearly defining them. We have an appetite for violence and so declare war on our vices. We have a war on obesity, war on poverty, war on drug abuse, war on terror, war on promiscuity, war on greed, war on corruption, failing to realize in everyone of these wars we are failing, stuck, because buried in the violence is the actual cause. We fail to look at the problem from a complementary vantage point of vertical and lateral thinking, but exclusively in terms to top down vertical thinking with linear logic, cause & effect analysis, dividing the problem into manageable pieces, and then putting it back together as the solution. This is critical thinking or thinking in terms of what is already known without the complement of creative thinking, or what is not known, but can be found out. Creative thinking is mainly bottom up thinking or lateral thinking, thinking that is holistic, counterintuitive and conceptual. Knowledge power is not the exclusive domain at the top of the hierarchy but in the middle and bottom of the organization as well. The organization must flatten out to garner the full advantage of its intellectual capital. Top down needs the complement of bottom up thinking. But there is a problem. It is our take on authority. For one, bottom up thinking doesn’t want to be tagged with the responsibility should something go wrong; and for another, it doesn’t know how to leverage its thinking to complement top down vertical thinking. Professionals are programmed, as are their blue-collar colleagues to be reactive, passive, submissive, and surrendering to the will of the organization.
DV: So what is the answer?
DF: The answer is not teaming, not working as a family, or some other patronizing dribble. The answer is counterintuitive. It is confrontation, conflict and creativity. Workers don’t have to love each other to work productively together. They need only to respect and accept each other as they are. Then they will confront and criticize each other honestly and timely when something goes wrong. They will do this frequently and politely, not infrequently and violently. Managed conflict is the glue that holds workers to the task at hand.
DV: Conflict and creativity. Could you say more?
DF: An organization that is hitting on all cylinders talks about real things to real people in real time. There are no favorites. When somebody sees something wrong, it is reported. The messenger isn’t killed. When workers have a problem with each other, it is managed, not avoided, ignored or denied. Studies have shown that when all elements of a system are working as well as they can, then the overall system is not. And the corollary, when the elements of the system are not performing as efficiently as they can, then the overall system is. This is counterintuitive but has proven to be the case. Competition between units is divisive; cooperation is uniting. Competition has proven the wrong motivating strategy. We have seen this again and again when every department reaches 100 percent of its goal while the company is failing.
DV: So what is the payoff of A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD?
DF: We don’t stay stuck. We don’t remain a sick society. We get on the same page and off on the same dime. We don’t retreat into oblivion. We don’t let the world take the game we invented away from us.
DV: That’s what you see happening?
DF: Oh, yes.
DV: Your evidence?
DF: I could simply say, “read the book,” but that would be a cop out. Evidence is everywhere. In the 1970s, we saw a paranoid president hunker down. He had been paranoid long before. Third in his class at law school at Duke University, he broke into the dean’s office to see his grades only to be caught. Watergate was anticlimactic. We saw it in the S&L banking scandal and in Enron. The recent sub-prime real-estate fiasco is anticlimactic to chronic cultural greed. Each episode has proven further evidence of a sick society, stuck and diminished, not only in our own eyes, but also in the eyes of the world. We argue that Viet Nam and Iraq are not the same, yet watch as Congress repeats the same histrionics. Then as now Congress continues to miss the changes, stays the same, and leaves the future up for grabs. We have failed to act effectively against this because we are caught up in the pathology of normalcy. We are stuck in WWII nostalgic hubris failing to see our descent is marked with a cultural plague. This plague is seen everywhere in colorful casinos across the land that produce nothing but feed misplaced dreams.
DV: They produce jobs, bring serious money into communities.
DF: But where does this money come from? It comes from people that can least afford it.
DV: You don’t know that for certain. Anyway, what will convince me to read A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD?
DF: I’m saying we have failed to look back and as a consequence have failed to see ahead. The evidence is everywhere but the reader must sense it. We are failing to see we are going the same way of the Greeks, Romans, Spanish, and English. We’re seeing the “American Century” sputtering to a whimpering end. We’re seeing all the resources that made us great now diminishing us because we haven’t paid attention.
DV: So this is a gloom and doom book.
DF: No. It is a kind of coming to Jesus meeting.
DV: That pretty stern stuff.
DF: Well, these are pretty trying times.
DV: Then would you say A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is uplifting?
DF: Let me put it this way, when I was a young man and came back from South Africa, where I experienced the ugliness of apartheid, I felt terrible because I could identify with the Afrikaners. The Boers, as they are known, are farmers like us, ordinary, conscientious, hard working, God fearing people. They created this monstrosity apartheid with four million whites governing 14 million Bantu or blacks. The majority population was without a vote, without rights or privileges, without freedom of speech, movement or association, yet these same Afrikaners felt they had done these people no harm. I saw this, experienced the benefits of it, me a simple man from Iowa of modest circumstances living the life of a colonial king, and it was too much.
DV: What did you do?
DF: I retired, took a two-year sabbatical, after which I went back to school looking for answers.
DV: Did you find them there?
DF: No, I found the university was another factory producing a product not unlike the products the corporation I had just left.
DV: That’s pretty critical. You’re kind of a serious dude. So, what do you expect to happen with this book?
DF: I hope something happens like it did to me when I returned to the United States from South Africa, and found myself in one of those little newspaper kiosks in New York City. I purchased a little book that changed my life. It was by Alan W. Watts and was titled simply, THE BOOK. I would like this book to do the same thing to someone else. When you write a book, you hope it touches a cord in the reader that hasn’t been touched before. That is my aim.
DV: But it sounds like a book more for academics. You’re smiling, why are you smiling?
DF: That is the easiest way to reject this book, to think that thinking is the exclusive domain of academics and specialists, not the general reader, not everyman and every woman. I am not an academic. I am a man of ideas that belongs to no coterie of elites, no special school of thought that can verify my pedigree as a qualified thinker. I am a man who grew up in the shadow of the courthouse, and ponders things because I can and because I must. Universities don’t have time for me.
DV: Why do you say that?
DF: I’m an outsider.
DV: You admit it.
DF: I cherish it. It gives me great freedom. I’m academically trained but not an academic. I’m a former corporate executive who has worked at every level of the organization from the lowest to the highest, and yet I’ve never joined the club. I’ve written nine books and hundreds of articles, yet I’m neither a journalist nor intellectual.
DV: So, you’re not a celebrity.
DF: No, I’m a voice in the wind, and a voice that will soon be leaving this town. Thank you very much.
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Books mentioned in this interview are available on the Internet, from your favorite bookstore, or from http://www.fisherofideas.com/.
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