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


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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.

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Dr. Fisher's newest book is "A Look Back to See Ahead" (AuthorHouse 2007).