COMMENT & RESPONSE TO "TEN DAYS THAT CHANGED AMERICA FOREVER!

COMMENT AND RESPONSE TO “TEN DAYS THAT CHANGED AMERICA FOREVER!”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 13, 2008

“As the sun is best seen at his rising and setting, so men’s native dispositions are clearest seen when they are children, and when they are dying.”

Robert Boyle (1626 – 1691), English Chemist and Philosopher

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COMMENT OF A CANADIAN

“Ten Days the World Would Like to Forget" might be a good alternate title.

So many people are confused and anxious, having been fed a steady diet of bad news for several weeks.

It's true; the real economy has been disconnected from the financial economy for a long long time. While it seems no one knows how to fix the system, a certain group does have the answer, but they will keep that information to themselves, ready to cash in when they can buy up the world at 10 cents on the dollar.

But it's not like there were no warnings. We all knew the party would end someday.



DR. FISHER RESPONSE:

The comment of this Canadian is an astute observation of the current uncoupling of the real economy from the financial economy. He is a person I’ve known only through this medium for several years now.

Where I think we see the situation a little differently is his reference to “a certain group does have the answer, but they will keep that information to themselves.” If it were only so!

It has been our dependence on our leaders to take care of us, to do the heavy lifting, “the right thing,” to be sagacious when we have felt foolish or fool hardy that has vanished. That is the monumental change in the firmament.

Folly now belongs to us all! We are all lost and must find our way as leaders because that has been the problem: we are all quintessential followers from the highest to the lowest, waiting for someone else to save us from ourselves.

My Canadian friend made me reflect on the importance of “the word.” It so happens that I’ve been reading the book of the biblical scholar Dr. Bart D. Ehrman titled “Misquoted Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why” (2005).

What is apparent is that the Bible is a very human book. First, the New Testament was written centuries after the Life of Jesus, and then the surviving manuscripts appear to be copies of copies of copies, ad infinitum, with no clear appreciation of how closely they reflect or relate to the original documents.

Moreover, as much as 90 percent of the early copiers of the New Testament, as late as the fourth century, were illiterate, and copied letter by letter without punctuation or word separation. In 1707 the biblical scholar John Mill of Queens College, Oxford, published the “Greek New Testament,” reporting some 30,000 textual errors. Subsequent scholars have reported hundreds of thousands of such errors.

Since letters were not separated, “godisnowhere” could mean “God is now here” or “God is nowhere.” Then author Ehrman, to illustrate the difficulty, asks does “lastnightatdinnerisawabundanceonthetable” report a normal or supernatural event?

I make reference to this human phenomenon for reason.

It made me realize that most information we receive and process comes from secondary and tertiary sources, and not from our experience or from each other. It comes from outside us not from inside us. We then bless this information as fact, echo its sentiments and then share it with each other, changing it as our exchanges multiply, mimicking the colossal errors biblical scholars have found in the Sacred Word, and then acting on this suspect information only to wonder why we are so lost.

Today, I watched the “Charlie Rose” show on PBS television in which he had a Wall Street critic, a journalist and a hedge fund manager discuss the current financial crisis. It is apparent that they don’t have a clue, none of them. In fact, they can’t even define the problem in precise terms but echo the rhetoric that we have heard for the past several days.

Then I turned to C-Span in which Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi gathered a cadre of experts around the rostrum to give one minute dissertations of how each of them saw the current financial crisis, and what should be done about it.

Were this “Saturday Night Live!” I would have marveled at this tragic comedy charade, but this was a collection of serious people taking themselves and their views seriously, expecting to assure us, the watcher and listener for their collective effort. I found this theater chilling and unsettling. It gave me the distinct feeling “no one is in charge.”

One of Charlie Rose’s guests said that experts were falling over each other to get to Wall Street to give their two cents, when they should be calling on the White House. Imagine that. We call the President of the United States the “most powerful leader in the world,” and these experts are treating the White House as if nobody is at home.

Listening to these experts, and being a small investor long retired, it is disconcerting to see people we have elected, or people placed in positions of authority, power, trust, integrity and loyalty show a fawning deference to their respective roles, while displaying little appreciation of the mess they have engineered either by commission or omission. They appear so full of themselves on camera that they seem unaware of the empty suits they appear to be, or to appreciate the fact that they have failed us, and in failing us have failed themselves and the world.

We are a reactive society, which has failed in memoriam to appreciate we don’t anticipate but react to crises. The crises we react to are the crises we create. Have no doubt the people who resolve this current financial crisis will be treated as heroes. Where were these heroes before the financial crisis got out of hand? They were either feeding it, or too entrenched in their careers to raise their voices more than a mummer.

I’ve been writing more than thirty years now about the “leaderless leadership” syndrome. Leadership calls for a vision to see and an ability to serve, for having the character and courage not only to commit to the challenges, but also to become totally involved in the process. So, if the ship goes down the leader goes down with it, and doesn’t get lifted to safety out of the fray by a helicopter.

We have created a “cult of leadership” which sees itself above the fray and not to be measured by the same criteria as the working stiffs in the trenches. We have allowed this cult to flourish with failed executives getting tens of millions of dollars in golden parachutes as they depart the bridge from their failed helm, as the ship goes down.

The “cult of leadership” subscribes to the dictum that self-interests take precedence over duty. At the highest levels, and I’m speaking from my own corporate experience, it is more important to get along and go along than to rock the boat with disturbing information or contrary analysis. In this cult the sycophant rises to the top as "pyramid climber." These ambitious types are always campaigning for the next job never having time to do the job paid to do. It is a nostalgic post World War Two fixation that American enterprise still holds close to its heart.

Personality is more important than perception, being a loyal member of the team more important than seeing the emperor is naked and reporting the same.

My message, which has not been heard, has been directed to millions like myself who have risen from the lowest social economic situations in our society to some level of influence.

People are afraid to voice their views for fear of losing their job, failing to be promoted, or indeed, being made redundant. I have spoken for them and to them. They hear me but do not heed me because it is too dangerous. Now, that danger has turned into a possible total social economic collapse.

Should China, for one, call in its note on the trillions of dollars she has loaned us, dollars that continue to fuel our economy, our financial house of cards would collapse. We are counting on China not doing this because we are her best customer.

Dr. Fisher, I am asked repeatedly, why do you still write if this is so painful for you? Good question.

To be published, it is not necessary that you write well, or even that you write meaningfully, but like everything else, it is important that you coach your words palatable to your audience, flattering the reader that he or she possess gravitas when that is unlikely.

Readers are looking for answers, not questions, for solutions, not problems, for someone else to do the heavy lifting, not them. Unfortunately, no one can do the heavy lifting for anyone else. This is the dilemma and why problems go unanswered or exacerbate to the current financial crisis.

I’ve self-published most of my views, or have been published by periodicals that appeal to consultants who find this as a means to free advertisement. Actually, it is not free. I have been paid in the four-figures for similar pieces in more commercial venues. Currently, I have had 341 such articles published. Do the math. It’s not chump change.

Given my views, however, I can say emphatically that I’ve never received work from this exposure. In fact, more than 250 of such articles are still in print, many now on www.google.com. That said I’ve invested more than $100,000 of my own money in this venture because I wanted someone, some ordinary soul like myself to give voice to the little guy. I might add I don’t regret a moment of my time or money in this pursuit. I would do it all over again, and yes, probably in the same way.

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PS Today, economist Paul Krugman of Princeton University was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for Economics.

Krugman is the exception to what I’ve said here, a lone voice that got it right, but couldn’t budge the Bush Administration.

My first contact with the economist was about eight years ago in the pages of the “New York Review.” I’ve been a fan of his ever since. I mention him here because he has advocated for some time the banking policy now proposed here and being adopted in Europe – i.e., government takeover of banks. He was interviewed tonight on “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer” about his Nobel Laureate, and modestly didn’t mention this.