Reflections on This Little Essay: STUCK IN THE SIXTH GRADE

Reference: STUCK IN THE SIXTH GRADE


My dear readers!

Thank you for the many responses I've received from this missive. This little essay has generated more responses than any other I have ever posted on my email or website.

It makes me wonder why. Some have suggested STUCK has universal themes; many have suggested that it should have much wider circulation in such diverse publications as PARENT, READER'S DIGEST, HARPER'S, ATLANTIC MONTHLY to name a few.

Some have suggested that I concentrate on writing lessons for young people.

One simply said, "It is BEAUTIFUL” (the reader’s upper case).

As I've said many times, these things come to me as I walk. I don't attempt to formulate them; my mind does all the work. I simply transcribe them. That is why I describe myself as the PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER.

There can be a lot of reasons to explain the reaction to STUCK.

One might be nostalgia for the way it was and no longer is; another for frustration with the way it is; and more fundamentally, a third may be that people of all ages -- young as well as old -- sense that "what is," that thing we call "reality," is undergoing a possible Quantum leap.

Some paleontologists theorize the plight of all living things on earth take periodic evolutionary leaps, that evolutionary change is not a constant but an interrupted process.

Pitrim Sorokin suggests that such Quantum leaps are manifested every 600 years; that we are at the end of a 600-year-Sensate Cultural Day.

Sorokin's evidence is our modern and postmodern preoccupation with natural biological functions and ephemeral pleasure. He sees us moving into a 600-Ideational Day, where radically new ideas will be embraced. His books, written 70 years ago, read like Nostradamus.

Perhaps our institutions, which seem to be struggling on wobbly legs, are actually in a state of collapse bordering on disintegration, and out of this possible dust will rise a new Phoenix consistent with Sorokin’s prophecy. .

The best evidence is that society is out-of-joint with work, communications and play with the times. We cannot seem to escape our factory mentality or orientation.

WORK is something we do today most strenuously to accomplish too little, when work has moved swiftly from brawn to brains, and from physical effort to mental reflection, or to a new kind of stasis.

When WORK becomes a manufactured center of life than life has to be by design placed on the periphery.

You no longer work to live, but live to work, accumulating more and more of what you don't want or need but simply must have.

This is not your fault but the fault of your factory programming. Our consumer driven economy has resulted in the mummification of human motivation into walking boredom. “Driven” is the operative word as 70 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) depends on us spending until we are broke, or even beyond.

INFORMATION is seldom any longer self-generated but second-third-or-fourth hand through what is popularly known as media. Media are mainly through television and other fun electronics such as the Internet, and less so through printed sources.

People no longer read, digest, assimilate, and process information on-their-own. They rely on media to do it for them.

And what are media?

Media are the processed confections of our time; the "information bologna," or processed lunch meat like data, which is collected from "undisclosed sources," then generated, packaged, distributed, and sold as NEWS, mainly through television or the Internet.

Like lunchmeat, "information bologna" is far removed from the original sources with only vague indications of its original aspect. Not surprisingly, it is as indigestible as these processed meats at your local supermarket, which it resembles more than it would like.

PLAY makes media look like original products by comparison. PLAY has ceased to be spontaneous, or even active, but reactive as media have become, but even more so. The best evidence is professional sport, theatre, art, literature, and even the crafts.

At the end of the SENSATE DAY that Sorokin refers, we are almost, I say almost, a totally passive factory oriented society. Nearly everything is created for our passive consumption. Moreover, at a time when leisure is a distinct possibility, we work harder and harder with the accelerator to the floor burning up rubber and going nowhere.

Yes, I know I keep drumming away at this, and it is easy to so ho hum, but there is a crack in the factory.

You see it in self-published books that are rivaling the established industry, which, incidentally, is dying.

If anyone reading this has read Kathy Flippo or Dixie Land, out of our own frozen tundra, you know how healthy this industry is.

Kathy and Dixie would not consider assuming the mantle of brave souls, but they are. They are both authentic voices of the future and there are hundreds of thousands just like them rises out of the swamps and mountains, and valleys, and wilderness, and plains of our vast land. They are part of the IDEATIONAL CULTURE looming on the horizon. And they are evidence that the Phoenix is rising.

I have suggested elsewhere, however, that we continue to operate in a climate of the pathology of normalcy, when what appears normal is pathological. It is the central theme of A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), in which I use the 1970s to compare to today and see the same things happening only with different names of people, places and things.

For the past 100 years we have been developing a working society with passionate determination that would have citizens schooled in the "3-R's" and programmed in punctuality, obedience, politeness, discipline and passivity. We still need the “3-R’s,” but these programmed attributes are counterproductive to a society that needs creative not critical thinking to survive.

We have become a factory society at home, at school, in the workplace, how we generate and distribute our communication, and even in our play.

Everything is organized to the nth degree, and continues to be stubbornly so, even when it no longer works or is relevant.

We who are Americans see ourselves as a superpower when we have 50 million people who cannot read this little missive, and who live at or below the poverty level. As bad as this is, tens of thousands attempt to cross our borders every year because where they are is even more depressing and less sustaining.

Do you think they like coming here to America? They consider it necessary.

We attempt to solve these problems with a factory mentality in an age that no longer operates like a factory, but more like the gravitational tides, and so the constant disappointments and failure to even touch much less deal with reality. People sense this.

We want everyone to be college graduates when we don't have enough carpenters, plumbers, electricians, farmers, gardeners, builders, bricklayers, and other technicians to keep the fabric of society intact. Our infrastructure is decaying for this deficiency.

A factory mentality is a reactive mentality. That is how we have been programmed. It is how we solve our problems at home, in school, at the office and workplace, and in government.

We react to the problems rather than anticipate them. This has created a solution driven industry. The factory mentality is well in evidence with the Dr. Phils and Oprahs who have created an entertainment media to feign to solve problems of the nuclear family, social relationships, and the workplace, while generating a plethora of books to replicate the factory in design and function and purpose.

The fact that it is not working fails to get attention because it is so deeply engrained in our nature. But many people sense that something is awry.

Even now, in this election year, in which well-meaning politicians act as if they are still in the sixth grade while spending millions of dollars, we humor them because we look for them to solve our problems, which they cannot solve, because we remain passive.

We have never grown up to understand leadership, and so look for it as if the Holy Grail.

Our preoccupation with leaders and leadership is symptomatic of society out-of-joint.

A friend copied me on a piece that is flying across the Internet regarding a new book by Lee Iaccoca. I don’t know whether what is quoted is what Iaccoca said or not, but I have read his biography and an unauthorized biography of him, and he is a cigar-smoking, tough-guy talking man’s man, who likes to play the heavy as if he is some kind of a maestro, and we should therefore listen. If any of what was contained in this review of his new book is true, it feeds on what I have said here. We are good at complaining but not resolving, good at generating solutions looking for problems, but have little appetite or inclination to doing the heavy lifting of the problem defining. For example, no one wants to define the problem of immigration because than our slothfulness, rapaciousness and xenophobia may be exposed.

No one has written more perceptively and more profoundly about the problematic nature of the problem solving than William L. Livingston in his books titled “The New Plague” (1985), “Have Fun At Work” (1988), and “Friends in High Places” (1990). You probably never heard of these books, never saw them in bookstores, or saw glowing reviews about them in the national media because they were self-published, and sadly, no longer in circulation. But Livingston planted the seed in my mind and others, and it will continue to bear fruit, as the new day you sense is upon us.

Be always well,

Jim

See www.fisherofideas.com for more information about books mentioned here.