WHAT WE REALLY KNOW, WE DON'T!

WHAT WE REALLY KNOW, WE DON’T!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 5, 2008

“Knowledge is but folly unless it is guided by grace.”

George Herbert (1593 – 1633), English poet


When I read carefully skewed quotations from an author’s body of work, I think of the more than a million words I've published in my adult life over the past forty years, not including all the words I have posted on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com).

How easy it would be to craft a case to use my words against my best intentions. It is the danger of being a writer and having your thoughts recorded for posterity, thoughts that are changing, maturing, and being redefined as you move into differing moments of your experience. This occurred to me as I read the political traffic concerning the approaching presidential election.

The paradox of politics is that it has a momentum of its own but nonetheless subject to being personalized. We as a people choose individuals or have them chosen for us to lead. It is true in all aspects of our lives. Politics is not confined to government. Politics pervades every aspect of our existence.

Politicians differ little from ourselves, only they have taken a stride of separation away from us to be celebrated or castigated as the case may be. In the end, we get the leadership we deserve.

Leadership is a reflection of how we think, feel, and behave and embodies our fears, biases, dreams, fantasies, as well as our secret hates and loves. There is a national psyche as well as a personal psyche and no one exploits this better than politicians. We are not simply blue or red states but clusters of attitudes and values.

The irony is that the persons who receive credit or blame or are made scapegoats are only part of the momentum and mainly fortuitous benefactors or victims of this force.

The problem with facts and statistics is that they are subject to misinterpretation or selective interpretation. When people are reduced to numbers, or identified in select categories, the human goes out of being.

This is not new but a product of communication from the time man first invented language. There are predators and prey in all of the animal kingdom, and with man the predator and prey are often opposite sides of man's conscience. Politicians jump on this predilection to ride its momentum, which has a mind of its own.

For example, when I was a boy, I was told Iowa’s only president, Herbert Hoover, caused the Great Depression. Time has proven he was a scapegoat. The actual cause was the "anything goes" insouciance of the Jazz Age and the "Roaring Twenties," which included wild speculation on Wall Street after WWI.

Proof that we never learn is the new century's brand of insouciance. Were it not for some safeguards, God only knows where we would be. Blame it on oil or the sub prime fiasco, but who caused this? People did. We did. Everybody did. People we put in leadership positions didn't have the bottle to say, "Hell, no, we can't do that." They went along because their thinking machine was stuck on "more."

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was given credit for pulling us out of the Great Depression when it was World War II. We were still in the depression in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, which changed the momentum.

More recently, president Bill Clinton was given credit for the economic rebound in the 1990s, which was actually fueled by the late economic policy changes of George H. W. Bush, another case of momentum.

The beautiful thing about our system is that the transition from one administration to another, although heatedly contested during the primary campaign and presidential election, once a winner is declared, the American people usually rally around the elected president.

I say "usually" because that was not the case with Abraham Lincoln. He had to be secretly escorted to Washington, D.C. for fear of being assassinated. I was reminded of this in a book I picked up recently, "Lincoln: His Words and His World."

Imagine the "Great Emancipator" was considered a lightweight, unqualified for the presidency with his single term in the House of Representatives, a "country bumpkin" from Illinois, poorly educated, although a successful lawyer.

Cartoons of hate couldn't have been more vicious in their attacks on him. Known for his silver tongue, cutting humor, and storytelling, even these were lampooned. His mind was crafted in language like a fine carpenter but this, too, was used against him. Fortunately, the momentum of the times was ready for him. Were the waffler general George McClellan to have been elected president, we might have been two nations today.

When I was a lad in high school, I read two books that have stayed with me all my life. Sinclair Lewis called his book, “It Can’t Happen Here”; the other was, "Mein Kampf" (My Struggle) by Adolf Hitler.

The Lewis book was about fascism finding its way into American society, in other words, that it could happen here!

Hitler, the little corporal from Austria was jailed in 1923 after his failed "Putsch" rebellion. This gave him the opportunity to write his book. He had had a history of failure from his earliest days. He blamed the Versailles Treaty in Paris after WWI, which was not as draconian as alleged, for Germany's economic woes. He then played on German pride with ideas spelled out in "Mein Kampf."

It was all there, the idea of a "master race" lifted from Nietzsche, and disposing of the "Jewish Question" with a rationale that Jews were an impediment to Germany's triumph.

For his failure as an artist, he blamed Jewish authorities in Austria and not on his lack of talent. Thus, a personal angst became successfully translated first into national identity, Nazism, and then national shame, the Holocaust.

We have two decent men running for president, but they both ride the momentum of two costly wars that rose out of the terrorist attack of 9/11. George W. Bush, whom I think a decent man, was caught up in the moment and we know the rest.

What do we really know? If the truth were told, we don't know anything. Our minds are locked into selective memory, selective data, and selective justification. I have a son who is so cynical that he refuses to register to vote. Sinclair Lewis was speaking to him in "It Can't Happen Here."

People on Dr. Don Farr's Network are not like my son. I expect that 100 percent of them will vote. I applaud them for this. I would hope, however, that some of them suspend certainty and explore the momentum to which I speak.

The next president is not going to change the momentum. The momentum has too much of a will of its own, and it is not limited to the United States. The next president has to find a way to deal with this momentum outside traditional channels as friends and enemies in the international community suggest war as an option might best to be left behind.

Be always well,

Jim