FRAGMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY -- TWO KINDS OF PEOPLE

FRAGMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY – TWO KINDS OF PEOPLE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 27, 2008

“Young people are the antithesis of extremism while being portrayed as being just that by the media. They see through the hypocrisy of a society that is living out George Orwell’s ‘1984,’ conducting a war that makes no sense to them, a cause for which they are expected to join and possibly die with patriotic zeal without moralistic persuasion.”

“A Look Back to See Ahead” with reference to the Vietnam War, page 48



There are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who think there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t. I’m definitely of the former persuasion.

Long before I wrote A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), I was a corporate executive and adjunct professor, working about the world and then teaching graduate students at several local universities.

I found two different kinds of co-workers as well as students. My co-workers were so immersed in what they were doing to have little inclination to think beyond the task at hand.

Some of my students looked at a range of current social problems and thought everything looked pretty much the same as they had always looked with a few blips in the road, but otherwise no big deal. They took comfort in the adage: the more things change the more they remain the same.

For them, current crises whatever they were mashed together into a mega-mash so at the end of the day they felt little inclination to look at things differently. If they were optimists, they colored the conditions to fit an optimistic slant. If they were pessimists, assorted calamities were ticked off to validate their pessimism.

Then there were those who looked more deeply into conditions to discover patterns that revealed something different. What had been was not what was happening now. They abandoned conventional wisdom and sought new approaches to gain insight into the problems at hand.

I must admit they were rare, perhaps one out of every one hundred with whom I worked or taught. My co-workers were interested mainly in how much money they made, while my students were most interested in the grade they would earn.

For my deep thinkers, however, every situation was unique with its own set of challenging variables, its own systemic dimensions, generating its own pristine assumptions, in a word, justifying a fresh approach deserving fresh eyes to define the problem freshly.

Unfortunately, as rare as I found this fresh approach at work or in the classroom, I found it even rarer in leadership.

That said I must confess that when I was in college, and a bit later, when I was first in the working world, I belonged to the first set of people. Everything looked pretty much alike. Europeans were like Americans, as were Canadians, as were Mexicans and South Americans. But that would change. I started to grow up when I was point man in crisis after crisis in South Africa in 1968. Now, in my thirties, I no longer enjoyed the luxury of seeing everything the same as I was bombarded with too many differences.

I came face to face with the Afrikaner government’s apartheid policy of separate development of the races. The white government of less than one-quarter of the population controlled the Bantu majority of three-quarters of the population who had no vote, few rights, and were totally subjugated “for their own good.” And I was an operative in that anachronistic colonial environment.

Even so, it didn’t register until my Bantu gardener was murdered on my estate and the crime was treated as if a dog had been killed. This moving experience converted me from thinking everything was basically the same to seeing everything was richly different.

People who think there are two kinds of people in the world don’t necessarily see themselves as being one kind of person today and another kind of person tomorrow.

They don’t expect to change because they see no need to change. They buy into the satisfying propaganda that keeps them content as they are while embellishing differences. This finds them buying into such myths as the rich are different than the poor, the “best and the brightest” are different than the “less gifted and dullards," whites are different than blacks, and so on. If you think these differences are apparent, then you're confirming the problem and bias I'm attempting to illustrate.

Some people look at a range of things and think everything looks the same. What is happening today for them is like things were in the past. All events over time are mashed together to suggest what has happened in the past.

I was trained to be obedient, to be polite and submissive to authority, to treat the dogma and dictates of my Irish Catholic faith without challenge, to be a good student, then loyal employee, following the rules, and submitting to the demands of my superiors. Being first trained as a chemist, I accepted the laws of my discipline without question.

Subsequently, I was trained to be a leader of men. I would discharge my paternalistic authority consistent with that training with little or no deviation from the norm. The more successful I became the more I developed a refined sense of just how different workers were from me their leader, that is, until South Africa.

South Africa was such a jolt to my life perspective that I returned to the United States, and retired. It was 1969. I wrote an essay to myself, put it away and didn’t look at it again until 2006. It would become A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.

You see in rereading this essay in the new century I realized we were still prisoners of the last century despite the media glitz to the contrary.

Over a lapse of forty years, little had changed by 2007. Young people were now engaged in another unpopular war, political upheaval was still in the air, corrupt politicians who had lied and cheated the electorate were once again on trial, drugs were still ruining lives, morality remained on holiday, and new forms of bigotry and hatred were hatching.

The automotive industry was once again in sharp decline, while OPEC was manipulating crude oil production. Lame duck president Bush was hunkered down and a law unto himself, while Congress continued to vacillate staying the same, missing the changes, failing to face them leaving the future up for grabs.

The subprime real estate crisis was festering but no one could see it coming because everyone was stuck in the bubble of euphoric bliss. It is amazing how reticent the best minds are in society until there is no recourse but to act, and always too late to avoid the tsunami of consequences of their inaction.

Now, we are about to elect a new president. From the campaign trail, would you say these candidates see two kinds of people in the American electorate or not?

Consider this. Presidential candidates US Senator Barak Obama and US Senator John McCain, as well as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernacke, and Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulsen talk about the current economic crisis as if it is 1929 again.

As a consequence, at least as they communicate to the public, they soft-pedal the unique factors given birth to it. It is not enough to promote the mantra of how complex finance is. After all, it is arithmetic, not quantum mechanics or astrophysics. The devious math has been used to hide profits and hoodwink the public. The "invisible hand" of self-interests has proven a flawed concept for the times, and further evidence that the past is not the present.

The bailouts and rescue packages are reminiscent of similar strategies during the Great Depression. Nobel Laureate Paul Kruger of Princeton claims we need the equivalent of FDR’s (president Franklin Delano Roosevelt) “New Deal.” He fails to note FDR’s National Recovery Act (NRC) of 1933 was later ruled unconstitutional.

Nor is it mentioned that the United States was still mired in the Great Depression when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, resulting in World War Two.

The United States would not enter the war until after December 7, 1941 when the air and sea forces of the Empire of Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands and knocked out the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet.

It was World War Two that pulled the American economy out of the Great Depression and not the “New Deal.”

The past is the past and the present is the present and as much as they might seem the same they are not. The thinking of the past is never right for the thinking of the present. The present is never the past but uniquely different. It requires richly different thinking and action. It also requires each of us to know what persuasion we are when it comes to the two kinds of people in the world considered here.