THE DANGER OF A FALSE SYLLOGISM
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 28, 2008
“Horses have four legs, cows have four legs, therefore horses are cows.”
It isn’t often that I disagree with syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell, many of his books on education have been gems, but he stepped over the line today with his column “Don’t Kill The Corporate Goat.”
Sowell presents the Russian fable of two peasants: one Ivan and the other Boris. The only difference between the two is that Boris has a goat and Ivan doesn’t. One day, Ivan came upon a strange looking lamp, and when he rubbed it a genie popped out. The genie told him he could have one wish of anything in the world he wanted, and he said, “I want Boris’ goat to die.”
Sowell leaped from that premise to the media, politicians, and yes, several writers such as myself who have been deeply offended with executive compensation.
Personally, I benefited from such compensation when I was young with Nalco Chemical Company and when I was mature with Honeywell Europe Ltd. In either instance, I was not worth as much as I received, and those far below me were deserving of much more than they received. I quote the late much esteemed management guru Peter Drucker in CORPORATE SIN (2000) on his take on the gap between CEO pay and workers in the 1990s:
“In the current version of business ethics in the United States, one side has all the obligations and the other side has all the entitlements. This is compatible neither with the ethics of independence nor with a universal code of ethics. It corrodes the bond of trust that ties superior to subordinate.”
Sowell’s syllogism is false for many reasons, but chiefly because of its failure to take into account the ethics of compensation and its relationship to the bond of trust between thinkers and doers.
Moreover, executive compensation is anachronistic as is the role of the CEO atavistic as primary corporate thinker and decision maker. Doers today are every bit as important as thinkers as they are as doers. They are essential to the health and well being of the corporation. The problem too often is that the troops, mainly professionals, are silent sentinels.
Let me continue on Sowell’s syllogism. He claims, rightly, that if the czars of oil companies received zero compensation, it would not change the price of gas at the pump, if the compensation of CEOs of automotive companies was reduced to zero, it would not change the price of an automobile off the assembly line a dime.
Then he leaps to this: “Too many people are like Ivan, who wanted Boris goat to die.” In other words, we take pleasure in accusing corporate executives of having the goat (large compensation and entitlements) and being the source of our discomfiture and displeasure. Wrong! It is far more comprehensive than that.
To substantiate his case, and to put meat on the skeleton of his false syllogism, he writes:
“The average pay of a CEO of a corporation big enough to be included in the Standard & Poor’s Index is less than one-third of what Alex Rodriguez makes (the New York Yankee Third Basemen makes more than $30 million per year with bonuses), about one-tenth of what Tiger Woods makes (the championship golfer makes, with endorsements, more than $100 million a year), and less than one-thirtieth of what Oprah Winfrey makes (the television entertainer, writer, publisher, and philanthropist makes about $300 million a year).. But when has anyone ever accused athletes or entertainers of ‘greed’?”
Notice no mention is made of the revenue these super athletes earn for investment capitalists and shareholders in the enterprises they support.
Incidentally, an African American Major League Baseball (MLB) player by the name of Kurt Flood started the surge in salaries for professional athletes in 1969.
Flood challenged the legality of the reserve clause that could trade him from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Philadelphia Phillies, a move that upset him. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled against Flood, 5 – 3, and essentially ended his baseball career.
It, however, panicked MLB owners to arbitration, noting the closeness of the decision. It led eventually to salary arbitration for professional athletes in all sports.
One athlete surrounded by many lambs said, “Hell, no, I won’t go!” And he changed MBL history. Today, we see owners attempting to “buy championships” by flooding the market with cash. The lowly Tampa Bay Rays, a team whose total player payroll in 2008 approximated Alex Rodriguez baseball income, won the American League Title and went on to play in the 2008 World Series.
The Tampa Bay Rays demonstrated leadership (on and off the field), strategy, chemistry, and commitment, something missing in most of corporate leadership today.
Regrettably, People are apt to read Sowell, and say, “Heh, the guys got a point. I never thought of that?” Think again. Apples are not oranges, and horses are not cows.
Then consider this: the chances of a person becoming Alex Rodriguez, Tiger Woods, or Oprah Winfrey are about one in 500,000 to a million.
By the same token, chances of becoming the CEO of a large American company are about one in 500 to a thousand.
Being an exceptional athlete is very difficult. It takes more than talent, dedication, and intelligence, which all are necessary, but being at the right place at the right time, and even then, hundreds of thousands are not going to make it.
The late great Wimbledon Champion, Arthur Ashe, once wrote a column advising young African Americans to concentrate on their studies instead of trying to become the next “Arthur Ashe.” He cited chances of reaching athletic supremacy to the pinnacle of sport in the NBA, NFL or MLB were close to one in a million, but that becoming a doctor or lawyer with concentrated effort were less than one in a hundred. And, of course, he was right.
Individual achievement is compensated so well because such success at the highest levels is rare. There are at least, and I am being conservative, five million Americans at this moment writing or having written and published a book. How many do you think are making even a conservative living as a writer? I am talking about people making $75,000 or more. It is less than 10,000 full-time writers in a population of 330 million Americans.
Sowell’s subject of corpocracy I have been tracking for forty years, first as a working stiff, second as a manager, third as an executive, fourth as an academic, fifth as a consultant to corporations, and finally today, as a writer and observer of corpocracy.
To become a CEO is relatively easy compared to individual achievement as outlined here.
The first requirement is to fill the right boxes. Lee Iacocca gave a classic menu of his rise to power, fame and executive compensation in his autobiography (Iacocca 1984). It was, as they say, right on the money:
(1) Go to the right university,
(2) Get the right degrees,
(3) Become an apprentice in the right industries,
(4) Find the right mentors, and coaches,
(5) Marry the right women, and live in the right neighborhoods,
(6) Go to the right churches, and choose the right friends,
(7) Dress the part,
(8) Belong to the right clubs,
(9) Drive the right automobile.
Concurrently, while you are dedicated to doing these things, like the Congressman, you have to campaign for the next job finding little time to do the job for which you are paid.
A CEO-in-the-making must be a talented pyramid climber. That means taking credit when credit is due and avoiding blame when things go awry. Moreover, it means changing careers or companies, and sometimes even professions, when it seem the ship or the career is sinking.
At work, the CEO-in-the-making must make a concerted effort to have access to the offices of the powerful. Others will see him coming and going into such offices and assume he has influence, and is a winner. They will start rallying around him. What they don’t see is that he has the talent to present their ideas as his. The powers that be are suitably impressed, which was always his intentions, and he is off to the races.
He researches the favorite charities of the powers that be and supports them with generous contributions he can’t afford, but which he sees as an investment, being clever enough to make them aware of his generosity.
He volunteers for difficult assignments knowing he has the support group with the skills to pull it off. He flatters his troops and invites them to a cook out at his home with everyone forgetting he took total credit for the coup.
He humbly tells his bosses, “I couldn’t have done it without my staff,” when in fact he couldn’t have done it at all. The powers that be smile and congratulate him, giving him a special bonus, forgetting in their rise how they once used the same ruse.
Now, here comes the problem.
When the aspiring executive’s eye is always on the prize and not on the job, when he finds his skills much more honed to critiquing the work of others rather than generating real work, when his only true experience is vicariously through the efforts of others, when it comes time to think, to lead, to see clearly beyond the end of his nose, he finds he has spent all his intellectual capital in cunning, and now must fly by the seat of his pants.
It is why we are in the subprime fiasco, Iraq fiasco, Wall Street meltdown fiasco, automotive meltdown fiasco, oil company fiasco, and on and on.
We have had an absence of leadership which surprisingly, perhaps not so surprisingly, has eroded over the past fifty years as executive compensation has gone through the roof: from 50 times the average earnings of the worker who produces to 1,000 times his efforts, not to mention the golden parachutes received once such leadership leaves the ship often as it is sinking into a sea of red ink. No problem, the compensation package is still there.
We no longer award leadership so why should we be surprised when there is none?
Sowell writes: “Those who want more power have known for centuries that giving the people somebody to hate and fear is the key.”
This remark surprises me because I know the biography of Thomas Sowell, and he has embraced fear and hatred to rise to his heights. Does he think most of us are any less than him? I don’t think so. I think he is a good man, but wrong in this piece, which is a departure from him.
Sowell sees the rise of Robespierre in eighteenth century France as a result of his promotion of hatred of the aristocracy, claiming that he acquired more dictatorial power than the aristocracy ever had, which was true. Sowell politely forgets this revolutionary figure's rise was the effect not the cause of the French Revolution of July 14, 1789.
The soldiers that day were ordered by King Louis XVI to storm the Bastille, and put down the rebellion. Instead, they turned their weapons aside and joined the people in revolt. Why?
Because people were starving while royalty was living grandly. Marie Antoinette is alleged to have said, “Let them eat cake.” Even if she didn’t say it, the monarchy had emptied the treasury with unfortunate investments, senseless wars, extravagant indulgences, and total disregard of its people. NO LEADERSHIP.
In the 20th century, Sowell goes on, both the czars and the capitalists in Russia were made targets of public hatred by the Communists on their road to power.
He fails to mention that Nicholas II was a totally inept monarch with a disastrous war with Japan, with over fifty percent of the population illiterate and in poverty, while he created convenient alliances with his relatives in France and Great Britain as if ruling was a family picnic.
I traveled in Russia last summer and the Russian people, who are now in much better times, still reminisce about the monarchy. People like to look up to someone. Why else would Great Britain, Denmark, and many other European countries still have titular monarchies? Obviously, the people pride rather than fear and hate these monarchs.
I am rereading “USA” by John Dos Passos, which is about the first thirty years of the twentieth century in the United States.
You get a flavor of the unrest in this country when “Robber Barons” hired thugs to kill and maim strikers and union organizers early in the last century. These czars had such names as Carnegie, Mellon, Morgan and Rockefeller.
John Dos Passos’ book gives you a flavor of the protest marches against President Woodrow Wilson’s bringing the United States into WWI after running for a second term on a peace platform.
People were put in prison during WWI for protesting against the war, and weren’t allowed to organize rallies.
You get a flavor of Wall Street greed in this period when John Pierpont Morgan controlled interests in New York, Paris and London, four national banks, three trust companies, three life insurance companies, ten railroads systems, three street railway companies, an express company, the International Mercantile Marine, and maintained cantilever options through interlocking directorates over eighteen other railroads, U.S. Steel, General Electric, AT&T, and five other major industries.
J.P. Morgan had so much power that kings and queens, and presidents would break their lunch schedules to entertain him and his ideas. We don’t have that kind of power now, at least not as transparent, but the quest for it remains. The House of Morgan often avoided meltdowns similar to those now being experienced, but it is still in the mix today.
Who would have thought President George W. Bush, or any president for that matter, would be a non-president in the waning days of his administration?
President-elect Barak Obama has had a series of White House News Conferences with the press, and even has staff in the White House two months before he takes office working on economic policy. Who would have thought?
The CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, of AIG, and GM, of Citigroup and other companies would not be facing bailout if they had led. Instead, we see them with tin cups in their hands wanting to be bailed out for non-leadership.
AIG received $35 billion and promptly celebrated with a $400,000 executive party. GM, Chrysler and Ford come to Washington, DC in separate private jets expecting a $25 billion bailout with absolutely no plan, but NEED. NO LEADERSHIP.
Sowell’s syllogism will not track because American workers and American consumers are not hateful or fearful but tired.
American workers and American consumers are tired of having leadership that cannot be trusted; tired of leadership that does not lead; and tired of being the fall guy when privileged people screw up, people who don’t think of anything but covering their own asses, baby boomer pyramid climbers who thought it was all about “them” and not all about “us.”
It is “all about us” when they screw up. Listen to GM’s Wagner whine: “We produced (gas guzzling) SUV’s and trucks because that is what American consumers wanted.” In other words, it is our fault, not theirs that they are bankrupt. We let them down, they didn’t let us down. They have done no wrong. So, we as consumers pay more for what we buy and we as taxpayers are expected to bail them out when they are going off the rails.
The United States of America has the best-educated workforce in the history of man, and possibly, just possibly, the worst leadership at the top since Roman Empire. It was Rome that promoted the carnage at the coliseum as the barbarians from the north sacked the city. American leadership has not taken advantage of this intellectual capital and we have all suffered for it. There is a line in the second volume (“1919”) of John Dos Passos’ novel, “USA” that seems apropos: “We’re the Romans of the Twentieth Century.” My wonder is if this is still not true of us in the twenty-first.
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. is an industrial and organizational psychologist writing in the genre of organizational psychology, author of Confident Selling, Work Without Managers, The Worker, Alone, Six Silent Killers, Corporate Sin, Time Out for Sanity, Meet Your New Best Friend, Purposeful Selling, In the Shadow of the Courthouse and Confident Thinking and Confidence in Subtext. A Way of Thinking About Things, Who Put You in a Cage, and Another Kind of Cruelty are in Amazon’s KINDLE Library.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
ARE WE BECOMING ANDROGYNOUS?
THE MAKING OF THE ANDROGYNOUS PERSON & THE COLLAPSE OF GENDER
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 17, 2008
“To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons. The same holds true of ourselves. We are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., “The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (1996)
A WRITER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
You use your lack of training as a clinical psychologist to dismiss the likelihood of having valid insight to PTSD. Yet, you introduce a valid hypothesis regarding the escape from death as a source of PTSD.
This disorder often focuses on foot soldiers that see the enemy in life or death situations. In reading this, I recalled my father. He was a gunner’s mate on a destroyer escort in the Pacific. He and his ship were in the historic naval battles at Midway, Guadalcanal and the Coral Sea. He was an alcoholic, sometimes violent.
When I was very young, in the Fifties, he would get drunk and talk about his war experiences. His ship was torpedoed. Many sailors above and below his deck were killed. He took shrapnel in his hand. He recalled seeing the Sullivan brothers as they were transferred to the Juneau, a munitions ship which he saw blow up, I think, at the battle of Midway. He talked about the sharks and kamikazes. And nearly always questioned, "Why am I here, why did I make it when so many others didn't?"
The thing that really scared and scarred him, I know this because he talked about it the least and not until the Sixties, was witnessing an atom bomb test explosion at Bikini Atoll.
While people built bomb shelters and talked about how they might survive an A-blast, he knew the futility. Think of how few people in the world have seen a nuclear weapon explode. Even firsthand he said the power released was unimaginable. That might have traumatized him and others more than all the battles.
Some people consider themselves lucky to survive and revel in their good fortune. Others question it interminably. The questioning raises a variety of doubts. Doubts leave the door ajar for all sorts of demons to escape into one's consciousness.
Some are strong (I don't like the use of that word here) enough to vanquish the demons, others choose to dull the visions through drugs and alcohol, and some seek "professional" help. Unfortunately, the professionals sometimes make mistakes and refute the claims because they might not fit the clinical model. The personal battle goes on.
Humans are resilient, as E so aptly demonstrates by accepting that the other candidate winning is not prelude to disaster. It is that resilience that confuses professionals. Each of us in our past has been given reasons to believe things will or will not improve. Our experiences and what we have been taught lead us to march forward, change paths or turn back.
When things were difficult, my mom would always tell me, "Better days are coming." It was sort of a Little Orphan Annie philosophy grown out of the Great Depression.
Better days did come. And they went. And they returned.
Maybe PTSD wasn't recognized as much after WWII because those armed forces were somewhat calloused to trauma. They "gutted it out" through psychologically trying episodes in belief of better days to come. That might sound as if to justify professionals who fail to recognize PTSD. This generation of soldiers (Iraq and Afghanistan) brings with them a very different life experience. In this, “everybody wins” society, they might not have had the opportunities to learn resilience.
Sorry for the long rambling response.
M
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
M,
I have a clinical bent mainly through extensive reading along with course work in the discipline, but as I told BB I could not be a clinician.
A colleague of mine wanted me to go in with her practice remembering me from school. I sat in on a few sessions and determined that the people she was treating could afford the luxury but didn't need it.
Another reason was I always became exhausted doing seminars, and felt this would be exacerbated in the more personal arena.
The third reason I found clinical psychology more about methods and models than people.
That said I see the value of confession. BB was reared a Protestant and feels Catholic Confession is a little absurd. People confess their sins and then repeat them, which they do. We like to tell someone our secrets. That is the value of ministers, rabbis and other religious. They listen confidentially and help us drive our demons to the surface, where they no longer turn our stomachs into chambers of acid. A valued friend does the same thing. Confession is good for the soul.
Your father’s military experience was horrific. Words cannot measure its horror. WWII in the Pacific was a terrible war. I captured a glimpse of this from that wounded soldier who stayed with us in the 1940s. He rented a room while surgeons repaired with plastic surgery the cheeks of his butt blown away on Guadalcanal. The surgery was done at US Schick General Army Hospital in my hometown of Clinton, Iowa.
I can't imagine witnessing the explosion of an atomic bomb, as did your father. My wonder is if he was poisoned with radiation.
My da died of multiple myeloma when he was forty-nine, a disease of the blood making machine of the bone marrow, better known as a form of leukemia. He always wondered if atomic tests conducted in the western United States were a contributor. I've wondered the same.
It seems when they were doing all those tests they knew little of how harmful they might be to people thousands of miles away.
Regarding PTSD, I believe it is far more common than we think. Traumatic death and dying are not confined to the battlefield, but are part of everyday life. I know PTSD is identified with military combat but life has become a combat zone of death and dying if not identical to this syndrome certainly of amazingly similar conditions.
When I was young, my cousin returned from WWII to his wife and lovely child intact. The boy, Billy, five years old, contracted spinal meningitis and died within 36 hours of the disease being diagnosed.
They were a young couple, she beautiful and he Hollywood handsome. He died psychologically that day, developing heart trouble and physically dying young. She persevered, remarried, and now in her late 80s, has lived a full and productive life with the same sparkle in her eyes of her youth.
The death of little Billy reduced his father to a shadow of himself. He had been a premiere miler going to the Chicago Games in the 1930s and running a 4:38 mile, which was outstanding for the time. Was he suffering from PTSD? I think so.
I agree humans are resilient but death for some throws them off their compass. It would seem men more often than women. I sense that an internal gyro is part of our instinctive makeup, but requires attention. This gyro can get clogged and the mind malfunctions as the arteries can get clogged and the heart malfunctions. The athleticism of the spirit is critical to the health of this instinctive gyro.
Death is a normal experience of us all, but dealing with death in blunt pessimistic terms as Schopenhauer suggests is often less apparent, as I show in my piece, "Is Your Life A Novel?" Schopenhauer saw optimism as a denial of reality. Conversely, he didn’t see pessimism as the negative as our culture sees it, but in terms of essence.
Life is full of trauma, and when the demons it unleashes surface, we are ready for them if our instinctive gyro is working and if we are in touch with the reality of our experience. If not, if we dodge or deny it, then we are likely to resort to all kinds of artificial palliatives including but not limited to drugs and alcohol.
Your mother was a saint as I think most mothers are. My empirical work has suggested mothers are usually the strong parent. Why so?
Most mothers seem to have their feet firmly planted in reality while their husbands often display the waxed wings of Daedalus and attempt to soar into the sun. We know what happened to Daedalus. Mothers accept their lot, and make the most of it. But maybe this, too, is changing.
A chief engineer at Honeywell was demoted, given an office next to mine, and no work to do but kept on full salary. He went to pieces, became an alcoholic, and then died far before his time.
An executive secretary at Honeywell was demoted, about the same time, given an office and no work to do but kept on full salary. She radiated charm and good will, coming to the office with a large smile on her face. She would do her nails, call friends, read her magazines, and paperbacks, or run off to the plant cafeteria to have a coffee. She also could be seen to be writing letters to friends on a company provided typewriter, or leaving early for a hair appointment, manicure, or an early film, day after day after day.
The job was the chief engineer's life. The job was a means to an end for the executive secretary.
The chief engineer had pride and worried about what others might think, feeling humiliated having no work to do. The executive secretary couldn't care less what others thought seeing her good fortune as a blessing in disguise, as her life was outside work.
In a curious way, we are losing your mother’s “better days are coming,” or a philosophical acceptance of the hand that is dealt. We see more women, and even mothers acting like men with a chip on their shoulders.
We have gone full circle to become androgynous with the characteristics of male and female seemingly to melt into a single prideful masculine. I say this as I listened on C-Span to our first female four-star general talk about her challenges and problems in the same corporate-speak of her fellow male four-star generals. She has joined the all boys club.
It is why I think so many female CEOs have failed, as they become A-type personalities, the model of romantic self-destruction and aesthetics machismo of the male dominated Boardroom.
My BB is a better executive than I ever was and she is not an A-type personality, but gets the job done.
My daughter, Laurie, is a stronger leader and more mature adult than either of my sons. She has been at the very top of the food chain or the top one/tenth of one percent of American households in income, and now struggles to keep her family together without apology or self-pity but most importantly, without remorse.
My son-in-law hasn’t worked in five years and is in excellent physical health, and holds a doctor in jurisprudence, but still remains wounded, still suffers what I call PTSD after seeing his many businesses die around him. It is a traumatic shock to the system, but why him and not her?
Why do I bring PTSD up? Men outnumber women eight to one as patients in military hospitals and outpatient clinics for PTSD, and I’m talking about tens of thousands of women formerly in the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq who somehow have avoided PTSD.
I suspect mothers have unwittingly given birth to unintended consequence by forgiving their sons for deviant behavior while punishing their daughters for the same deviance.
Mothers make excuses for their sons’ behavior but not for their daughters’. A girl in her early teens with raging hormones likes to dress up, wear makeup and go to parties. Many concerned mothers often call her slut. A boy in his early teens with raging hormones likes to party and has lots of girlfriends, not to worry, he is simply sowing his wild oats.
Mothers of my generation made strong daughters and weak sons. Now, I see both sons and daughter displaying a common weakness. Am I wrong? Am I misguided? Perhaps, but that is what I have observed.
Be always well,
Jim
PS I saw the film “The Fighting Sullivans” in 1944 (before you were born) starring Thomas Mitchell as the father. The five Sullivan brothers wanted to be on the same ship and went down with the Juneau in 1942. Your father was in touch with a part of history when he saw them transfer to their vessel.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 17, 2008
“To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons. The same holds true of ourselves. We are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., “The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (1996)
A WRITER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
You use your lack of training as a clinical psychologist to dismiss the likelihood of having valid insight to PTSD. Yet, you introduce a valid hypothesis regarding the escape from death as a source of PTSD.
This disorder often focuses on foot soldiers that see the enemy in life or death situations. In reading this, I recalled my father. He was a gunner’s mate on a destroyer escort in the Pacific. He and his ship were in the historic naval battles at Midway, Guadalcanal and the Coral Sea. He was an alcoholic, sometimes violent.
When I was very young, in the Fifties, he would get drunk and talk about his war experiences. His ship was torpedoed. Many sailors above and below his deck were killed. He took shrapnel in his hand. He recalled seeing the Sullivan brothers as they were transferred to the Juneau, a munitions ship which he saw blow up, I think, at the battle of Midway. He talked about the sharks and kamikazes. And nearly always questioned, "Why am I here, why did I make it when so many others didn't?"
The thing that really scared and scarred him, I know this because he talked about it the least and not until the Sixties, was witnessing an atom bomb test explosion at Bikini Atoll.
While people built bomb shelters and talked about how they might survive an A-blast, he knew the futility. Think of how few people in the world have seen a nuclear weapon explode. Even firsthand he said the power released was unimaginable. That might have traumatized him and others more than all the battles.
Some people consider themselves lucky to survive and revel in their good fortune. Others question it interminably. The questioning raises a variety of doubts. Doubts leave the door ajar for all sorts of demons to escape into one's consciousness.
Some are strong (I don't like the use of that word here) enough to vanquish the demons, others choose to dull the visions through drugs and alcohol, and some seek "professional" help. Unfortunately, the professionals sometimes make mistakes and refute the claims because they might not fit the clinical model. The personal battle goes on.
Humans are resilient, as E so aptly demonstrates by accepting that the other candidate winning is not prelude to disaster. It is that resilience that confuses professionals. Each of us in our past has been given reasons to believe things will or will not improve. Our experiences and what we have been taught lead us to march forward, change paths or turn back.
When things were difficult, my mom would always tell me, "Better days are coming." It was sort of a Little Orphan Annie philosophy grown out of the Great Depression.
Better days did come. And they went. And they returned.
Maybe PTSD wasn't recognized as much after WWII because those armed forces were somewhat calloused to trauma. They "gutted it out" through psychologically trying episodes in belief of better days to come. That might sound as if to justify professionals who fail to recognize PTSD. This generation of soldiers (Iraq and Afghanistan) brings with them a very different life experience. In this, “everybody wins” society, they might not have had the opportunities to learn resilience.
Sorry for the long rambling response.
M
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
M,
I have a clinical bent mainly through extensive reading along with course work in the discipline, but as I told BB I could not be a clinician.
A colleague of mine wanted me to go in with her practice remembering me from school. I sat in on a few sessions and determined that the people she was treating could afford the luxury but didn't need it.
Another reason was I always became exhausted doing seminars, and felt this would be exacerbated in the more personal arena.
The third reason I found clinical psychology more about methods and models than people.
That said I see the value of confession. BB was reared a Protestant and feels Catholic Confession is a little absurd. People confess their sins and then repeat them, which they do. We like to tell someone our secrets. That is the value of ministers, rabbis and other religious. They listen confidentially and help us drive our demons to the surface, where they no longer turn our stomachs into chambers of acid. A valued friend does the same thing. Confession is good for the soul.
Your father’s military experience was horrific. Words cannot measure its horror. WWII in the Pacific was a terrible war. I captured a glimpse of this from that wounded soldier who stayed with us in the 1940s. He rented a room while surgeons repaired with plastic surgery the cheeks of his butt blown away on Guadalcanal. The surgery was done at US Schick General Army Hospital in my hometown of Clinton, Iowa.
I can't imagine witnessing the explosion of an atomic bomb, as did your father. My wonder is if he was poisoned with radiation.
My da died of multiple myeloma when he was forty-nine, a disease of the blood making machine of the bone marrow, better known as a form of leukemia. He always wondered if atomic tests conducted in the western United States were a contributor. I've wondered the same.
It seems when they were doing all those tests they knew little of how harmful they might be to people thousands of miles away.
Regarding PTSD, I believe it is far more common than we think. Traumatic death and dying are not confined to the battlefield, but are part of everyday life. I know PTSD is identified with military combat but life has become a combat zone of death and dying if not identical to this syndrome certainly of amazingly similar conditions.
When I was young, my cousin returned from WWII to his wife and lovely child intact. The boy, Billy, five years old, contracted spinal meningitis and died within 36 hours of the disease being diagnosed.
They were a young couple, she beautiful and he Hollywood handsome. He died psychologically that day, developing heart trouble and physically dying young. She persevered, remarried, and now in her late 80s, has lived a full and productive life with the same sparkle in her eyes of her youth.
The death of little Billy reduced his father to a shadow of himself. He had been a premiere miler going to the Chicago Games in the 1930s and running a 4:38 mile, which was outstanding for the time. Was he suffering from PTSD? I think so.
I agree humans are resilient but death for some throws them off their compass. It would seem men more often than women. I sense that an internal gyro is part of our instinctive makeup, but requires attention. This gyro can get clogged and the mind malfunctions as the arteries can get clogged and the heart malfunctions. The athleticism of the spirit is critical to the health of this instinctive gyro.
Death is a normal experience of us all, but dealing with death in blunt pessimistic terms as Schopenhauer suggests is often less apparent, as I show in my piece, "Is Your Life A Novel?" Schopenhauer saw optimism as a denial of reality. Conversely, he didn’t see pessimism as the negative as our culture sees it, but in terms of essence.
Life is full of trauma, and when the demons it unleashes surface, we are ready for them if our instinctive gyro is working and if we are in touch with the reality of our experience. If not, if we dodge or deny it, then we are likely to resort to all kinds of artificial palliatives including but not limited to drugs and alcohol.
Your mother was a saint as I think most mothers are. My empirical work has suggested mothers are usually the strong parent. Why so?
Most mothers seem to have their feet firmly planted in reality while their husbands often display the waxed wings of Daedalus and attempt to soar into the sun. We know what happened to Daedalus. Mothers accept their lot, and make the most of it. But maybe this, too, is changing.
A chief engineer at Honeywell was demoted, given an office next to mine, and no work to do but kept on full salary. He went to pieces, became an alcoholic, and then died far before his time.
An executive secretary at Honeywell was demoted, about the same time, given an office and no work to do but kept on full salary. She radiated charm and good will, coming to the office with a large smile on her face. She would do her nails, call friends, read her magazines, and paperbacks, or run off to the plant cafeteria to have a coffee. She also could be seen to be writing letters to friends on a company provided typewriter, or leaving early for a hair appointment, manicure, or an early film, day after day after day.
The job was the chief engineer's life. The job was a means to an end for the executive secretary.
The chief engineer had pride and worried about what others might think, feeling humiliated having no work to do. The executive secretary couldn't care less what others thought seeing her good fortune as a blessing in disguise, as her life was outside work.
In a curious way, we are losing your mother’s “better days are coming,” or a philosophical acceptance of the hand that is dealt. We see more women, and even mothers acting like men with a chip on their shoulders.
We have gone full circle to become androgynous with the characteristics of male and female seemingly to melt into a single prideful masculine. I say this as I listened on C-Span to our first female four-star general talk about her challenges and problems in the same corporate-speak of her fellow male four-star generals. She has joined the all boys club.
It is why I think so many female CEOs have failed, as they become A-type personalities, the model of romantic self-destruction and aesthetics machismo of the male dominated Boardroom.
My BB is a better executive than I ever was and she is not an A-type personality, but gets the job done.
My daughter, Laurie, is a stronger leader and more mature adult than either of my sons. She has been at the very top of the food chain or the top one/tenth of one percent of American households in income, and now struggles to keep her family together without apology or self-pity but most importantly, without remorse.
My son-in-law hasn’t worked in five years and is in excellent physical health, and holds a doctor in jurisprudence, but still remains wounded, still suffers what I call PTSD after seeing his many businesses die around him. It is a traumatic shock to the system, but why him and not her?
Why do I bring PTSD up? Men outnumber women eight to one as patients in military hospitals and outpatient clinics for PTSD, and I’m talking about tens of thousands of women formerly in the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq who somehow have avoided PTSD.
I suspect mothers have unwittingly given birth to unintended consequence by forgiving their sons for deviant behavior while punishing their daughters for the same deviance.
Mothers make excuses for their sons’ behavior but not for their daughters’. A girl in her early teens with raging hormones likes to dress up, wear makeup and go to parties. Many concerned mothers often call her slut. A boy in his early teens with raging hormones likes to party and has lots of girlfriends, not to worry, he is simply sowing his wild oats.
Mothers of my generation made strong daughters and weak sons. Now, I see both sons and daughter displaying a common weakness. Am I wrong? Am I misguided? Perhaps, but that is what I have observed.
Be always well,
Jim
PS I saw the film “The Fighting Sullivans” in 1944 (before you were born) starring Thomas Mitchell as the father. The five Sullivan brothers wanted to be on the same ship and went down with the Juneau in 1942. Your father was in touch with a part of history when he saw them transfer to their vessel.
IS YOUR LIFE A NOVEL?
IS YOUR LIFE A NOVEL?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 18, 2008
“Existence is a constant hurrying of the present into the dead past, a constant dying. It is clear that, as our walking is admittedly merely a constantly prevented falling, the life of our body is only a constantly prevented dying, an ever postponed death. In the same way, the activity of our mind is a constantly deferred boredom. Every breath we draw wards off the death that is constantly intruding upon us.”
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860), German philosopher
Reference: What appears as yet another exchange on the American presidential election of 2008 turns into a broader discussion of who we are.
A WRITER WRITES:
More tinder for the fire: I voted for McCain. I don’t like McCain. I’ve never liked McCain. I voted against Obama because I thought he lacked the experience for the job and my life has taught me that relevant experience is the most important factor.
Without relevant experience, one is dependent on others.
We saw the shortcomings of that in the last administration; how many times in industry have you and I seen brilliant people make freshman mistakes because they listened to the wrong person, lacking the experience to accurately evaluate what they were being told?
Executives make decisions, and the quality of those decisions is driven less by intelligence than by the quality of the data upon which they decide.
Experience is the tool by which one sorts data from spin. Obama’s strengths – intelligence, smooth presentation, and race – were not, in my mind, the driving considerations.
Although over half of my income goes to taxes in one form or another, the 3% doesn’t bother me. It was the threat to double capital gains. It would’ve taken me five years of losing money to break even on the extra taxes.
The Democratic Congresswoman from California who presented the plan to nationalize pensions and 401K’s is who motivated me to make changes there. I think she put the issue very succinctly: we’ve got a large number of people about to retire, half have nothing saved, and Social Security as it now stands cannot handle the problem.
We either let half the people starve, or we spread the money around. We’re out of time for more fanciful solutions.
The odds of my collecting social security are 50-50 at best, but I’ve known that for decades so if I’m caught short, it’s my own fault. I’m going to need what I’ve put away; I can’t afford to just hope for the best. I don’t have enough time to recover and I’ve got family members I’m going to have to carry.
Little is actually known about the new President’s politics, so I don’t know if he’ll be a socialist or what. I question though, how often he’ll veto his own party on the Hill on paths that I think are not in the best long run interests of the country. Cuss Joe the Plumber if you like, but Mr. Obama’s own comments in response were enough to set off red flags for me.
This goes to my earlier comment that if my wealth is going to be spread around, I will decide when and to whom.
The vitriol is just as strong going in both directions, to wit the abuse of the Bush Administration by the left preceded by the harassment of the Clinton Administration by the right. (To this day, I don’t see where Ms. Lewinsky is any of my business.)
So too, is the assumption by both sides that those on the other side are ignorant or immature – that is not the case.
We all take different paths in life, we learn different things, and we develop different biases and come to different conclusions. That’s why rational discussion is so fundamental to democracy.
It’s late and I’m in the west. Gotta go.
e
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
E,
In a curious way I thought in reading this missive that you have the mind, method, message and mission for your challenges, as does Barak Obama of his.
Perhaps there is only six degrees of separation between us.
I wrote in one of my books (THE WORKER, ALONE!) that the purpose of life is it has no purpose. We insist that it does by making the simple complex and the complex simple.
Perhaps that got us all in this mess. Then again, as you point out, maybe some people expect to take money off the tree as a current television commercial suggests without any struggle and pain or any inconvenience to them. It would appear that grown-ups have become extinct, killed off by all the excesses that followed WWII including the bloated contracts of UAW workers, which were imitated by other unions, and the outrageous salaries and bonuses of executives, which continue to this day.
We have spawned a society of eternal adolescents who can't say "no," see everything in "politically correct" terms, and for the life of them cannot differentiate "right from wrong." So, why should we be surprised? It is axiomatic that the society we have created is the society that we have.
The paradox to my declaration ("life has no purpose") is that Schopenhauer has nailed me in my own tracks. I have "gone against the grain" with purpose. My life has been designed to challenge the status quo. It could be no other way.
There is a plan, he says, but God doesn't reveal it to us until we are ready to insert the last piece in our conscious puzzle.
People who are needy when they are young should not be surprised to discover they are equally needy when they are old.
People who are constantly explaining or complaining why they have not made satisfactory progress in life are likely to do so until there last dying breath.
Spreading the wealth around, as philanthropists and do gooders are prone to do, somehow finds the same ones needy and the same ones not ad infinitum. Philanthropy doesn't reduce the needy, but justifies and fuels it. Why is that?
Schopenhauer claims that when we reach an advanced age, and look back over our lifetime (I wrote a book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD), it can be seen to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist.
It is the same for institutional bodies. I wrote in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007) that the US Congress of 1972 "stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn't face them, and left the future up for grabs." Thirty-six years later, the same indictment of Congress has traction because it is stuck. And so it is with each one of us.
Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot.
So, who composed the plot? Where was free will in the game?
Schopenhauer answers: just as an aspect of ourselves composes our dreams of which our conscious minds are unaware, so, too, our whole life is composed by the will within us. He claims and I agree that will is God. How so?
He argues that the underlying nature of the empirical world consists in blind willing. It is true of us as individuals as it is of us collectively as institutional society. Our institutions are living organisms as are we.
If we look deep enough into ourselves, he says, we not only discover our true inner nature, but the essence of everything.
It is as if life and time and our conscious presence in it are revealed to us like an open book. Of course, most of us don’t want to acknowledge the book much less open and read it. We prefer to move forward in “constantly deferred boredom warding off the death that is constantly intruding upon us.”
Corporate society is dying all the time and requires negative entropy to revitalize it which means changing, that is, really changing not changing cosmetically to survive.
The irony is that I read Schopenhauer a long time ago, took many chances along the way, reading many other philosophers of an empirical nature, confirming his thesis time and time again, as I have always landed on my feet as he insisted I would if I was living my novel and not someone else's.
Are you living your novel? Only you can answer that.
By a curious coincidence, I am writing a novel of South Africa, a complex piece of work where my obscurantist nature is on display, seeing this beautiful man exuding idealism being tested by life in all its nakedness finding he is all too human. He is metaphorically America in all its disparate contradictions.
This is important because up to that time he thought he was above life, a loner on a mission, the "Lone Ranger" but with no Tonto. This is America in the twenty-first century.
What happened in South Africa gave the protagonist the courage to wash himself of that life and purpose. Otherwise, he would not have had the life that he has had, not met the people he has met, and not found his BB. He would have been a CEO and a miserable bastard that he was on track to become, rich and pathetic, and probably about now something of a great philanthropist.
It may seem absurd to think this has relevance to the United States in the twenty-first century, but absurdity has a natural connection with me.
Currently, I am rereading John Dos Passos's "USA" trilogy. Why? I'm not sure. But I do know the 1,200 page chronicle is a history of the spiritual life of the entire USA in the first three decades of the last century with no plot, no heroes but metaphorically shimmering with insights into a people and a time. I wonder if I’m trying to do that.
A curious thing, back to Schopenhauer's novel we are all writing, Dos Passos had a disruptive first five years of his life, as did I, and it made him psychologically detached with the feeling of the perpetual outsider, as do I. So, I'm back to those six degrees of separation.
Perhaps my novel will be seen as a mural of the USA in 1968 which I claim in my writing elsewhere as the defining moment in post-modernity. We shall see.
BB has challenged me when I say we never change. Schopenhauer would agree with me, but I still wonder as she is often more astute than I am.
Dr. Maria Montessori, the Italian physician and educator, once said, “Give me a child tell it is seven years old and it will be mine for the rest of its life.”
Dos Passos first five years defined him. He was a contemporary of Hemingway and his he-man esthetics, and Fitzgerald and his romantic self-destruction, while he preferred the role of the outsider, the inveterate wanderer and observer. His whole life fed off those first five years of traumatic existence.
I sometimes wonder if that is not true of me as well.
The mind of the outsider is inclined to display an inquisitiveness and unselfconscious surprise as if seeing life with fresh eyes and shocking innocence. Stay tuned. We shall see what we shall see.
Be always well and have a safe and prosperous western exposure.
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 18, 2008
“Existence is a constant hurrying of the present into the dead past, a constant dying. It is clear that, as our walking is admittedly merely a constantly prevented falling, the life of our body is only a constantly prevented dying, an ever postponed death. In the same way, the activity of our mind is a constantly deferred boredom. Every breath we draw wards off the death that is constantly intruding upon us.”
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860), German philosopher
Reference: What appears as yet another exchange on the American presidential election of 2008 turns into a broader discussion of who we are.
A WRITER WRITES:
More tinder for the fire: I voted for McCain. I don’t like McCain. I’ve never liked McCain. I voted against Obama because I thought he lacked the experience for the job and my life has taught me that relevant experience is the most important factor.
Without relevant experience, one is dependent on others.
We saw the shortcomings of that in the last administration; how many times in industry have you and I seen brilliant people make freshman mistakes because they listened to the wrong person, lacking the experience to accurately evaluate what they were being told?
Executives make decisions, and the quality of those decisions is driven less by intelligence than by the quality of the data upon which they decide.
Experience is the tool by which one sorts data from spin. Obama’s strengths – intelligence, smooth presentation, and race – were not, in my mind, the driving considerations.
Although over half of my income goes to taxes in one form or another, the 3% doesn’t bother me. It was the threat to double capital gains. It would’ve taken me five years of losing money to break even on the extra taxes.
The Democratic Congresswoman from California who presented the plan to nationalize pensions and 401K’s is who motivated me to make changes there. I think she put the issue very succinctly: we’ve got a large number of people about to retire, half have nothing saved, and Social Security as it now stands cannot handle the problem.
We either let half the people starve, or we spread the money around. We’re out of time for more fanciful solutions.
The odds of my collecting social security are 50-50 at best, but I’ve known that for decades so if I’m caught short, it’s my own fault. I’m going to need what I’ve put away; I can’t afford to just hope for the best. I don’t have enough time to recover and I’ve got family members I’m going to have to carry.
Little is actually known about the new President’s politics, so I don’t know if he’ll be a socialist or what. I question though, how often he’ll veto his own party on the Hill on paths that I think are not in the best long run interests of the country. Cuss Joe the Plumber if you like, but Mr. Obama’s own comments in response were enough to set off red flags for me.
This goes to my earlier comment that if my wealth is going to be spread around, I will decide when and to whom.
The vitriol is just as strong going in both directions, to wit the abuse of the Bush Administration by the left preceded by the harassment of the Clinton Administration by the right. (To this day, I don’t see where Ms. Lewinsky is any of my business.)
So too, is the assumption by both sides that those on the other side are ignorant or immature – that is not the case.
We all take different paths in life, we learn different things, and we develop different biases and come to different conclusions. That’s why rational discussion is so fundamental to democracy.
It’s late and I’m in the west. Gotta go.
e
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
E,
In a curious way I thought in reading this missive that you have the mind, method, message and mission for your challenges, as does Barak Obama of his.
Perhaps there is only six degrees of separation between us.
I wrote in one of my books (THE WORKER, ALONE!) that the purpose of life is it has no purpose. We insist that it does by making the simple complex and the complex simple.
Perhaps that got us all in this mess. Then again, as you point out, maybe some people expect to take money off the tree as a current television commercial suggests without any struggle and pain or any inconvenience to them. It would appear that grown-ups have become extinct, killed off by all the excesses that followed WWII including the bloated contracts of UAW workers, which were imitated by other unions, and the outrageous salaries and bonuses of executives, which continue to this day.
We have spawned a society of eternal adolescents who can't say "no," see everything in "politically correct" terms, and for the life of them cannot differentiate "right from wrong." So, why should we be surprised? It is axiomatic that the society we have created is the society that we have.
The paradox to my declaration ("life has no purpose") is that Schopenhauer has nailed me in my own tracks. I have "gone against the grain" with purpose. My life has been designed to challenge the status quo. It could be no other way.
There is a plan, he says, but God doesn't reveal it to us until we are ready to insert the last piece in our conscious puzzle.
People who are needy when they are young should not be surprised to discover they are equally needy when they are old.
People who are constantly explaining or complaining why they have not made satisfactory progress in life are likely to do so until there last dying breath.
Spreading the wealth around, as philanthropists and do gooders are prone to do, somehow finds the same ones needy and the same ones not ad infinitum. Philanthropy doesn't reduce the needy, but justifies and fuels it. Why is that?
Schopenhauer claims that when we reach an advanced age, and look back over our lifetime (I wrote a book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD), it can be seen to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist.
It is the same for institutional bodies. I wrote in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007) that the US Congress of 1972 "stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn't face them, and left the future up for grabs." Thirty-six years later, the same indictment of Congress has traction because it is stuck. And so it is with each one of us.
Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot.
So, who composed the plot? Where was free will in the game?
Schopenhauer answers: just as an aspect of ourselves composes our dreams of which our conscious minds are unaware, so, too, our whole life is composed by the will within us. He claims and I agree that will is God. How so?
He argues that the underlying nature of the empirical world consists in blind willing. It is true of us as individuals as it is of us collectively as institutional society. Our institutions are living organisms as are we.
If we look deep enough into ourselves, he says, we not only discover our true inner nature, but the essence of everything.
It is as if life and time and our conscious presence in it are revealed to us like an open book. Of course, most of us don’t want to acknowledge the book much less open and read it. We prefer to move forward in “constantly deferred boredom warding off the death that is constantly intruding upon us.”
Corporate society is dying all the time and requires negative entropy to revitalize it which means changing, that is, really changing not changing cosmetically to survive.
The irony is that I read Schopenhauer a long time ago, took many chances along the way, reading many other philosophers of an empirical nature, confirming his thesis time and time again, as I have always landed on my feet as he insisted I would if I was living my novel and not someone else's.
Are you living your novel? Only you can answer that.
By a curious coincidence, I am writing a novel of South Africa, a complex piece of work where my obscurantist nature is on display, seeing this beautiful man exuding idealism being tested by life in all its nakedness finding he is all too human. He is metaphorically America in all its disparate contradictions.
This is important because up to that time he thought he was above life, a loner on a mission, the "Lone Ranger" but with no Tonto. This is America in the twenty-first century.
What happened in South Africa gave the protagonist the courage to wash himself of that life and purpose. Otherwise, he would not have had the life that he has had, not met the people he has met, and not found his BB. He would have been a CEO and a miserable bastard that he was on track to become, rich and pathetic, and probably about now something of a great philanthropist.
It may seem absurd to think this has relevance to the United States in the twenty-first century, but absurdity has a natural connection with me.
Currently, I am rereading John Dos Passos's "USA" trilogy. Why? I'm not sure. But I do know the 1,200 page chronicle is a history of the spiritual life of the entire USA in the first three decades of the last century with no plot, no heroes but metaphorically shimmering with insights into a people and a time. I wonder if I’m trying to do that.
A curious thing, back to Schopenhauer's novel we are all writing, Dos Passos had a disruptive first five years of his life, as did I, and it made him psychologically detached with the feeling of the perpetual outsider, as do I. So, I'm back to those six degrees of separation.
Perhaps my novel will be seen as a mural of the USA in 1968 which I claim in my writing elsewhere as the defining moment in post-modernity. We shall see.
BB has challenged me when I say we never change. Schopenhauer would agree with me, but I still wonder as she is often more astute than I am.
Dr. Maria Montessori, the Italian physician and educator, once said, “Give me a child tell it is seven years old and it will be mine for the rest of its life.”
Dos Passos first five years defined him. He was a contemporary of Hemingway and his he-man esthetics, and Fitzgerald and his romantic self-destruction, while he preferred the role of the outsider, the inveterate wanderer and observer. His whole life fed off those first five years of traumatic existence.
I sometimes wonder if that is not true of me as well.
The mind of the outsider is inclined to display an inquisitiveness and unselfconscious surprise as if seeing life with fresh eyes and shocking innocence. Stay tuned. We shall see what we shall see.
Be always well and have a safe and prosperous western exposure.
Jim
Monday, November 17, 2008
OPINIONS -- TWO PASSIONATE VIEWS
OPINIONS – TWO PASSIONATE VIEWS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 17, 2008
“The same enthusiasm that dignifies a butterfly or a medal to the virtuoso and the antiquary may convert controversy into the idealistic, and present to the deluded imagination of the theological knight-errant, a barber’s basin as Mambrino’s helmet. The real value of any doctrine can only be determined by its influence on the conduct of man, with respect to himself, to his fellow creatures, or to God.”
James Gates Percival (1795 – 1856), American geologist
REFERENCE: A missive was written titled “To you two champions in the service of others,” which dealt with compliments to Dr. Donald & Sally Farr for their services to Memories, an electronic network that keeps folks of many generations in touch with their roots. The past election has stretched patience as well as passions to the breaking point. This was alluded to in this missive.
A response from my friend E was a spirited expression of this. I followed his missive with “Let Me Introduce You To Yourself – The Will to Power & the Bankruptcy of Despair” in which reference was made to E’s views.
The missive introduced many readers to themselves with the most interesting of responses. Although the responses that followed were addressed to me, I am presenting them as a quasi-exchange.
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
Fascinating - I really enjoyed reading that! I'm impressed by your serenity in this one. I think your friend... well, I'll be kind and leave it at this:
While myself a highly partisan Obama supporter, almost as much as I am a Bush-basher, I have nevertheless enjoyed sitting back at times to observe how we Americans are taking this political transition.
I was one of quite a number of folks upset - indeed, scandalized - at the first Bush 43 victory in 2000, and downright horrified and incredulous in 2004. Except for a few remarks about moving to Canada by some of these friends, those of us who voted Democratic pretty much took our lumps, waited for our turn, and carped from the sidelines - fun sport when it's so clear you were right.
I don't recall, in the past 8 years (and even with the shenanigans of the 2000 Supreme Court meddling), many examples of the vitriol that your friend and quite a number of other McCain supporters have been displaying.
To put it another way, we saw earlier elections as dismaying but (at least somewhat) fair. You win some elections, you lose others. I hear a number of the opposition acting as if it is the end of the world - or at least of our country, and of capitalism and Democracy - that their man did not win. It's unsettling and odd to me. I want to shake them by the shoulders and shout, "GROW UP!"
Seriously, imagine if one party, either one, had a perpetual hegemony. Would E want to live in that America?
While we felt of W and of McCain that they were not good candidates or good for the country, and while many of us probably feel that they are actually bad men whose tenure would harm our country (as Bush's has), as a group we did not think of them as enemies of our state and all it stands for. Yet I've picked up that quite a number of those on the right, like your friend E, think that Obama will actually bring harm to our country.
I remember quite well demonizing Carter in this way. I have always said with a second Carter term, we would have been learning Russian in school - at least, those of the intelligentsia our Russian masters didn't kill off.
Young, I thought this was humorous hyperbole, all the better because it was steeped in what I saw as truth, that Carter was exactly the appeaser the Russians most wanted. Now, as I think of my own mentality, that Liberals are anti-American, Conservatives odious but somehow wiser in matters of finance and national defense, I can see where E and his friends get their vitriol. And I renounce my own as not only foolish, but dangerous in the vein of yelling fire in a crowded theatre: not that I actually believed it, but that I was feeding the paranoia of the small-minded and easily manipulated around me.
Further, I don't understand how anyone of even modest intelligence can believe that Obama is a socialist, or anything like it - except insofar as you and I and all Americans are, in enjoying our Social Security et. al.
Obama has said he will lower taxes on the middle class a little, and raise taxes on those making over $250,000 by just 3%. Now, first off, who making that kind of money doesn't have an accountant good enough to help shield them from the full brunt of the tax law?
Second, three percent is class warfare? I should sell my CDs and buy a gun to protect my fortune and my family? Come now! And is universal healthcare socialism? Or is it a basic human right that the most affluent country on this earth has the moral obligation to ensure? If "fair" means "Socialist," then I accept my new label with pride.
Yes, I used to be a Regan Republican - and I was a Bush 41 Republican too, until the day he called off Operation Desert Storm, leaving Saddam in power. I wandered around as an Independent for years, until Bush 43 came along and I thought, "Any party leadership cynical enough to foist this idiot on their own voters and the country the claim to support has got to be stopped!"
T
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
T
First of all, quadrennial madness as I call it has never changed in my lifetime other than becoming more absurd, and yes, more expensive. We are gluttons for this type of punishment and I don’t see it ending any time soon. Yet, your gravitation to the way you think has a certain gravitas. I respect that.
Regarding my own self, I find, as I get older I get less religious instead of more so, and more liberal rather than conservative as many of my generation seem to become. BB says it is because I like to be contrary, but I choose to think it is because I see life less tragic and more comedic. To think life has any other purpose than to live it I called “toys of the mind” in THE WORKER, ALONE! (1995). I think going on two decades later I believe this even truer.
Your comments after post-election exhaustion were to take my friend E at his word when his message is in the blank space between, or what is not said but implied. You will see that as you read his most recent missive to me.
One of the ironies is that my friend E is a far better writer than I am, and yet he does not write other than for his work. If he wrote books, I'd read every one of them cover-to-cover, and probably over-and-over again. He is that good. There is fire and imagery in his language that burns away the fog to see things clearly. He is most vivid when he is most angry. Here he is not angry, but elucidating.
THIS IS WHAT HE WROTE TO ME AFTER I RESPONDED TO HIS MISSIVE
Jim,
Thank you for your, as always, deeply considered response. I think our assessment of President-elect Obama the man, matches very closely. Your analogy of lancing a boil is also accurate.
We live in a time where political disagreement immediately relegates us to one of two trash bins:
(1) If you disagree with the left, then you're a racist hate monger and probably a homophobe.
(2) If you disagree with the right, then you're a godless, anti-American loony tune.
I agree and disagree with both sides depending on the issue and so maintain residences in both bins.
I have the deepest respect for the strength of your mind, and how you wield it. I look to you both as an intellectual mentor, and as The Baptist, creating a forum for valuable intellectual dialogue.
As such, it's important to me personally that you not misunderstand where my passion comes from and where it's directed. Toward that end, I beg your indulgence while I pontificate on three points.
(1) I suppose I should be thankful that we transition power without tanks, but this past election process brought me down in what it revealed about ourselves.
All the candidates took aggressive license with the truth. Politicians do that, but this class seemed totally unrepentant when confronted with the truth. "I misspoke."
Misspoke hell, you outright lied. When one of the candidates did speak the truth -- e.g., Joe Biden's comment about a new president being tested -- the other spun it up and shoved it down our throats.
Both sides threw every dirt clod and dog turd they could get their hands on at the other.
The bias of the media toward the candidates they liked was blatant, but what angered me more was the arrogance and condescension they showed toward candidates of opposing viewpoints, on both sides.
This has been building for a while; the past two presidents have both been subjected to shameful disrespect.
Technology has given our media a position of tremendous power. I hope they take their dropping ratings and revenues as a message that they need to step up and shoulder the responsibility that goes with that power.
In a way, politicians are a mirror telling us what we, in the aggregate, want to hear. One would think that the daily act of shaving would toughen me to confronting ugliness, but this election process raised the bar. Do I expect too much, or are we really this low rent?
(2) It's my observation that pure capitalism and pure socialism produce the same result, a small elite and widespread poverty.
We've done a good job in this country of riding the middle and avoiding the deep ditches on both sides.
This election has taken the balance out of our system.
The door is now open to go as far to the left as they want. Not saying the right ditch is any better.
There's a common sense in this country that what happens in other countries cannot happen here because hey, we're Americans.
My view is that if it happened in Germany, it CAN happen here.
I fear the ditches and I'd like to see the pendulum keep swinging in small arcs around the middle, and not stop to stop, potentially going high order with the resultant destruction of our Republic.
(3) As much as I question his preparedness for the job and fear where the politics might lead, I would fight to protect Obama.
When I look at he and his family, I see the Kennedys and that brings up tremendous angst from the past.
I actually met Bobby Kennedy about ten days before he was shot. What I felt from that has not diminished in the decades passed, but it pales compared to what this country will experience if something happens to Obama.
There is so much hope and euphoria invested in this guy, especially from the minorities that the depth of despair will be immeasurable. My spies in Washington tell me the government is tripling the normal level of security around this presidency.
That's encouraging. It's the 21st Century and we will have idiots running around the woods in bed sheets. That's not encouraging.
Of all of my fears, this dwarfs the others. I find myself in the interesting position of praying for safety of someone in politics -- what little we actually know of them -- I oppose.
Thanks Jim for everything.
E
FINAL WORD
It was our own Thomas Jefferson who said, “Errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” We have such freedom and it is comforting to present it here.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 17, 2008
“The same enthusiasm that dignifies a butterfly or a medal to the virtuoso and the antiquary may convert controversy into the idealistic, and present to the deluded imagination of the theological knight-errant, a barber’s basin as Mambrino’s helmet. The real value of any doctrine can only be determined by its influence on the conduct of man, with respect to himself, to his fellow creatures, or to God.”
James Gates Percival (1795 – 1856), American geologist
REFERENCE: A missive was written titled “To you two champions in the service of others,” which dealt with compliments to Dr. Donald & Sally Farr for their services to Memories, an electronic network that keeps folks of many generations in touch with their roots. The past election has stretched patience as well as passions to the breaking point. This was alluded to in this missive.
A response from my friend E was a spirited expression of this. I followed his missive with “Let Me Introduce You To Yourself – The Will to Power & the Bankruptcy of Despair” in which reference was made to E’s views.
The missive introduced many readers to themselves with the most interesting of responses. Although the responses that followed were addressed to me, I am presenting them as a quasi-exchange.
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
Fascinating - I really enjoyed reading that! I'm impressed by your serenity in this one. I think your friend... well, I'll be kind and leave it at this:
While myself a highly partisan Obama supporter, almost as much as I am a Bush-basher, I have nevertheless enjoyed sitting back at times to observe how we Americans are taking this political transition.
I was one of quite a number of folks upset - indeed, scandalized - at the first Bush 43 victory in 2000, and downright horrified and incredulous in 2004. Except for a few remarks about moving to Canada by some of these friends, those of us who voted Democratic pretty much took our lumps, waited for our turn, and carped from the sidelines - fun sport when it's so clear you were right.
I don't recall, in the past 8 years (and even with the shenanigans of the 2000 Supreme Court meddling), many examples of the vitriol that your friend and quite a number of other McCain supporters have been displaying.
To put it another way, we saw earlier elections as dismaying but (at least somewhat) fair. You win some elections, you lose others. I hear a number of the opposition acting as if it is the end of the world - or at least of our country, and of capitalism and Democracy - that their man did not win. It's unsettling and odd to me. I want to shake them by the shoulders and shout, "GROW UP!"
Seriously, imagine if one party, either one, had a perpetual hegemony. Would E want to live in that America?
While we felt of W and of McCain that they were not good candidates or good for the country, and while many of us probably feel that they are actually bad men whose tenure would harm our country (as Bush's has), as a group we did not think of them as enemies of our state and all it stands for. Yet I've picked up that quite a number of those on the right, like your friend E, think that Obama will actually bring harm to our country.
I remember quite well demonizing Carter in this way. I have always said with a second Carter term, we would have been learning Russian in school - at least, those of the intelligentsia our Russian masters didn't kill off.
Young, I thought this was humorous hyperbole, all the better because it was steeped in what I saw as truth, that Carter was exactly the appeaser the Russians most wanted. Now, as I think of my own mentality, that Liberals are anti-American, Conservatives odious but somehow wiser in matters of finance and national defense, I can see where E and his friends get their vitriol. And I renounce my own as not only foolish, but dangerous in the vein of yelling fire in a crowded theatre: not that I actually believed it, but that I was feeding the paranoia of the small-minded and easily manipulated around me.
Further, I don't understand how anyone of even modest intelligence can believe that Obama is a socialist, or anything like it - except insofar as you and I and all Americans are, in enjoying our Social Security et. al.
Obama has said he will lower taxes on the middle class a little, and raise taxes on those making over $250,000 by just 3%. Now, first off, who making that kind of money doesn't have an accountant good enough to help shield them from the full brunt of the tax law?
Second, three percent is class warfare? I should sell my CDs and buy a gun to protect my fortune and my family? Come now! And is universal healthcare socialism? Or is it a basic human right that the most affluent country on this earth has the moral obligation to ensure? If "fair" means "Socialist," then I accept my new label with pride.
Yes, I used to be a Regan Republican - and I was a Bush 41 Republican too, until the day he called off Operation Desert Storm, leaving Saddam in power. I wandered around as an Independent for years, until Bush 43 came along and I thought, "Any party leadership cynical enough to foist this idiot on their own voters and the country the claim to support has got to be stopped!"
T
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
T
First of all, quadrennial madness as I call it has never changed in my lifetime other than becoming more absurd, and yes, more expensive. We are gluttons for this type of punishment and I don’t see it ending any time soon. Yet, your gravitation to the way you think has a certain gravitas. I respect that.
Regarding my own self, I find, as I get older I get less religious instead of more so, and more liberal rather than conservative as many of my generation seem to become. BB says it is because I like to be contrary, but I choose to think it is because I see life less tragic and more comedic. To think life has any other purpose than to live it I called “toys of the mind” in THE WORKER, ALONE! (1995). I think going on two decades later I believe this even truer.
Your comments after post-election exhaustion were to take my friend E at his word when his message is in the blank space between, or what is not said but implied. You will see that as you read his most recent missive to me.
One of the ironies is that my friend E is a far better writer than I am, and yet he does not write other than for his work. If he wrote books, I'd read every one of them cover-to-cover, and probably over-and-over again. He is that good. There is fire and imagery in his language that burns away the fog to see things clearly. He is most vivid when he is most angry. Here he is not angry, but elucidating.
THIS IS WHAT HE WROTE TO ME AFTER I RESPONDED TO HIS MISSIVE
Jim,
Thank you for your, as always, deeply considered response. I think our assessment of President-elect Obama the man, matches very closely. Your analogy of lancing a boil is also accurate.
We live in a time where political disagreement immediately relegates us to one of two trash bins:
(1) If you disagree with the left, then you're a racist hate monger and probably a homophobe.
(2) If you disagree with the right, then you're a godless, anti-American loony tune.
I agree and disagree with both sides depending on the issue and so maintain residences in both bins.
I have the deepest respect for the strength of your mind, and how you wield it. I look to you both as an intellectual mentor, and as The Baptist, creating a forum for valuable intellectual dialogue.
As such, it's important to me personally that you not misunderstand where my passion comes from and where it's directed. Toward that end, I beg your indulgence while I pontificate on three points.
(1) I suppose I should be thankful that we transition power without tanks, but this past election process brought me down in what it revealed about ourselves.
All the candidates took aggressive license with the truth. Politicians do that, but this class seemed totally unrepentant when confronted with the truth. "I misspoke."
Misspoke hell, you outright lied. When one of the candidates did speak the truth -- e.g., Joe Biden's comment about a new president being tested -- the other spun it up and shoved it down our throats.
Both sides threw every dirt clod and dog turd they could get their hands on at the other.
The bias of the media toward the candidates they liked was blatant, but what angered me more was the arrogance and condescension they showed toward candidates of opposing viewpoints, on both sides.
This has been building for a while; the past two presidents have both been subjected to shameful disrespect.
Technology has given our media a position of tremendous power. I hope they take their dropping ratings and revenues as a message that they need to step up and shoulder the responsibility that goes with that power.
In a way, politicians are a mirror telling us what we, in the aggregate, want to hear. One would think that the daily act of shaving would toughen me to confronting ugliness, but this election process raised the bar. Do I expect too much, or are we really this low rent?
(2) It's my observation that pure capitalism and pure socialism produce the same result, a small elite and widespread poverty.
We've done a good job in this country of riding the middle and avoiding the deep ditches on both sides.
This election has taken the balance out of our system.
The door is now open to go as far to the left as they want. Not saying the right ditch is any better.
There's a common sense in this country that what happens in other countries cannot happen here because hey, we're Americans.
My view is that if it happened in Germany, it CAN happen here.
I fear the ditches and I'd like to see the pendulum keep swinging in small arcs around the middle, and not stop to stop, potentially going high order with the resultant destruction of our Republic.
(3) As much as I question his preparedness for the job and fear where the politics might lead, I would fight to protect Obama.
When I look at he and his family, I see the Kennedys and that brings up tremendous angst from the past.
I actually met Bobby Kennedy about ten days before he was shot. What I felt from that has not diminished in the decades passed, but it pales compared to what this country will experience if something happens to Obama.
There is so much hope and euphoria invested in this guy, especially from the minorities that the depth of despair will be immeasurable. My spies in Washington tell me the government is tripling the normal level of security around this presidency.
That's encouraging. It's the 21st Century and we will have idiots running around the woods in bed sheets. That's not encouraging.
Of all of my fears, this dwarfs the others. I find myself in the interesting position of praying for safety of someone in politics -- what little we actually know of them -- I oppose.
Thanks Jim for everything.
E
FINAL WORD
It was our own Thomas Jefferson who said, “Errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” We have such freedom and it is comforting to present it here.
FEAR AND CIVILIZED MAN
FEAR AND CIVILIZED MAN
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 17, 2008
“The wise man has his foibles as well as the fool. Those of the one are known to himself, and concealed from the world; while those of the other are known to the world, and concealed from himself.”
John Mason (1706 – 1773), English clergyman
“Fear is implanted in us as self-preservation. Its duty is to support reason rather than burden reason. Ergo, fear should not be allowed to tyrannize our imagination with phantoms of horror, but rather be a constant reminder of our mortality and how best to use it. It is not enough to know oneself. It is necessary to understand oneself which activates self-acceptance and its function, self-preservation.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., “Fragments of a Philosophy” (unpublished)
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
Here's a question you may be no more able to answer than I, but here goes: has every society suffered from PTSD? I read "Red Badge of Courage" as a boy, so I know the Civil War took its emotional toll. Soldiers came home suffering from "shell shock" in WWI. What about pre-gunpowder societies? What about warrior societies, like the Greeks of Medieval Europeans, where bloodshed was an every-day occurrence? Is PTSD a byproduct of being civilized, of thinking of killing as wrong while we're growing up and home, then doing it ourselves when called to war?
Just curious. I'm inclined to think the problem may always have been with us, but in the days before psychology it went unrecognized. I'd enjoy some confirmation, though.
T
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
T,
I am not a clinical psychologist, but I’m not sure clinicians have successfully explored the depths of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Otherwise, psychiatrists with their prescription drugs, and psychologists with their talking cures would have had more success than they have had to date.
My expertise is at the organization level where I have seen PTSD palpable in the dying corporation.
I mention this because my sense is PTSD is less about killing than escaping dying. That said my interest is in the emotion of fear and its relationship to our mortality both as individuals, and collectively as a society.
My sense is that post traumatic depression (PTSD) has existed as long as man has killed man, and suffers the apprehension, indeed, the accelerating anxiety of escaping being killed with the depression of that reality which inevitably follows.
My sense, too, is that when a person has had a narrow escape from death, there is a posttraumatic realization that he is alive, causing a psychophysical shock to his system.
When I was in high school, and a basketball player, Del Ploen’s father took us to a basketball game in Davenport (Iowa) to scout our next opponent in the state high school regional tournament. I stepped off the curve near the fieldhouse and a car traveling at great speed almost hit me. It would have killed me. The realization of that, once it hit my conscious mind, threw me into a faint, and Del had to catch me before I fell to the pavement.
Imagine when that scenario, escaping from death is repeated day after day after day as is the case in a combat zone such as Iraq. The escape from that punishing reality is denial that is, pushing that reality far back from the conscious mind.
It is why, I suspect, combat veterans can become heavy smokers, drinkers, druggies, or lose their programmed civility and do terrible things, things that they would never think or imagine doing were they still totally in charge of their faculties.
You would think that the killing would be the cause of PTSD. I don’t think so. It is seeing body parts of your comrades on the road realizing that could have been me.
We demonize the enemy as being less than human and deserving being killed. It is the mantra:” kill or be killed!” Murder in war is justified homicide, and often gravitates to genocide. “We are protecting our way of life,” and the enemy is trying to take it from us.
When I was a boy, we took in renters during WWII. One was an outpatient at U.S. Schick General Army Hospital in my hometown. This ex-G.I. had a good deal of his butt shot off by a sniper at Guadalcanal.
My parents were good listeners, and I as well, often hiding behind the sofa, as he talked incessantly about his escape, while his buddies died. He talked about using flamethrowers to kill Japanese soldiers that made my hair stand on end, but that was not his concern. It was why had he escaped and not them. He was a wreck but I thought he was only strange. My mother told me one day, “Be kind to him. He is hurting, and remember, he is why you can grow up to be a man.”
What I remember most about that ex-G.I. is his eyes. They were wild, restless, and although I didn’t understand at the time, full of terror. He was still in that foxhole at Guadalcanal. My wonder now is how he would have behaved if ordered to return to the Pacific Theater during that war.
My reason for mentioning this is because the other night on “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer” on PBS the widow of a G.I., who had committed suicide, was interviewed.
She said her husband was fun and funny, and a joy to his children before he went to Iraq. He came home and he couldn’t sleep, yelled all the time, was critical of everything she did, and constantly badgered their two small daughters. The older daughter said one day, “You’re not my daddy. I want my daddy back.” This reduced him to tears.
The G.I. tried to be treated for PTSD but the Veterans Administration claimed he didn’t qualify. He sought help from a private psychiatrist, who prescribed medication, which his wife claimed did not help. Then, he was ordered to return to active duty in Iraq, and he committed suicide. He was twenty-six.
Incidentally, he had told VA counselors, according to his wife, that he saw buddies blown up in the Humvies with body parts all over the road. The VA counselors wanted to know the names and units of each of these incidents, and soldiers, something he was unable to deal with much less recall.
It was not the killing that was his anxiety; it was the dying.
From your question, I sense that you see it more in terms of the killing and not the escaping death.
My experience, and I should caution you again, is not from actual combat but from the proximity of it in 1957.
As a member of the US Navy Sixth Fleet, and as a hospital corpsman striker on the USS Salem CA-139, I was assigned to a company of US Marines as their corpsman when we were ready to go down the nets and into an LST to invade Port Said, Egypt in support of the British and French as they bombed the Suez Canal.
At the last moment, all of us in battle dress, President Dwight David Eisenhower withdrew support and commitment for this incursion. We were ordered to “stand down!” I nearly fainted. All I could think was that I would never see my son who was born while I was in the Mediterranean, that I would never be able to do all the things I had ambition to do. I was in shock and didn’t know it.
On the other hand, the Marines in my company were gun ho to kill some Egyptians. They were trained killers, fit, focused and fearless. They accepted me because I might help save their lives. It was funny in a way. Marines look down on sailors in general, but have a special bond with corpsmen, who have shown great bravery in battle with them. I felt hardly brave. I was terrified.
My experience, as you can see, is limited, but that G.I. mentioned here who committed suicide was a Marine Reserve.
The twenty-first century Veterans Administration does a fair if not excellent job in treating veterans with physical battle scars but it does an inadequate job treating veterans with invisible scars.
My parents were not educated, especially in matters of the mind as psychiatrists and psychologists are, but in retrospect, I think they saved that Guadalcanal veteran's life.
They stayed up for hours listening to him go over in minute detail the agony of his war. They didn’t interrupt or ask him embarrassing questions. He was a hero to them. He trusted them and increasingly talked about things that I didn’t understand, grown up things.
I think that young Marine that committed suicide might be alive today if he had had my parents to listen to him, to accept his pain, to share his horror, and let his mind release all its pent up confusion and see it dissipate into thin air.
More than 700 returning veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq have committed suicide, 700 men and women that escaped death in the battle zone only to have death haunt them and never release them from that horror once in the safety of their home environment.
Fear is something from which there is no escape but from which we can become self-estranged. We are supposed to be brave, but physical courage demands a separation from psychological fear. It is by embracing fear that we become brave, not by denying fear for fear is the mother of safety, not the opposite.
By a curious coincidence, most quotations with regard to fear are masked in the idea of evil, and not in the reality of mortality.
If we are truly in touch with the fact that we are all afraid of death, then we are ready to live. I have called this confident thinking.
If we are afraid to live a full life with all life's vicissitudes, then death haunts our ever move. There is no way to display confidence. We are obsessed with safety and there is no safety from death. Death is inevitable. There is safety in fear because it is Life’s providence.
It is ironic but true that people who are devoted to death defying feats are actually afraid of life. It is how they cope with fear.
It is also why the theater of violent sport is so appealing. It is a way to experience pain and danger vicariously. We have become a spectator society to life finding it more appealing to live vicariously through others we make celebrity because they live the glamorous dangerous existence to which we prefer fantazie.
It is a substitute for an active life without the pain of the reality of being hurt, disappointed, embarrassed or possibly destroyed. Why do you think scandal magazines are so popular? The scandalized are doing what we fear but find tantalizing.
The Roman Empire understood this syndrome and used it by having gladiators fight to the death in amphitheaters filled with passive spectators.
We haven’t made much progress with all our electronic and technological wonders at understanding our mortal selves. We have opted for distractions, not realizing that the less actively we are engaged in life the less fulfilling it can be. And what is the greatest problem of modern society? Depression. It is as if Mother Nature is telling us there is no escape from fear. So, use it!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 17, 2008
“The wise man has his foibles as well as the fool. Those of the one are known to himself, and concealed from the world; while those of the other are known to the world, and concealed from himself.”
John Mason (1706 – 1773), English clergyman
“Fear is implanted in us as self-preservation. Its duty is to support reason rather than burden reason. Ergo, fear should not be allowed to tyrannize our imagination with phantoms of horror, but rather be a constant reminder of our mortality and how best to use it. It is not enough to know oneself. It is necessary to understand oneself which activates self-acceptance and its function, self-preservation.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., “Fragments of a Philosophy” (unpublished)
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
Here's a question you may be no more able to answer than I, but here goes: has every society suffered from PTSD? I read "Red Badge of Courage" as a boy, so I know the Civil War took its emotional toll. Soldiers came home suffering from "shell shock" in WWI. What about pre-gunpowder societies? What about warrior societies, like the Greeks of Medieval Europeans, where bloodshed was an every-day occurrence? Is PTSD a byproduct of being civilized, of thinking of killing as wrong while we're growing up and home, then doing it ourselves when called to war?
Just curious. I'm inclined to think the problem may always have been with us, but in the days before psychology it went unrecognized. I'd enjoy some confirmation, though.
T
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
T,
I am not a clinical psychologist, but I’m not sure clinicians have successfully explored the depths of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Otherwise, psychiatrists with their prescription drugs, and psychologists with their talking cures would have had more success than they have had to date.
My expertise is at the organization level where I have seen PTSD palpable in the dying corporation.
I mention this because my sense is PTSD is less about killing than escaping dying. That said my interest is in the emotion of fear and its relationship to our mortality both as individuals, and collectively as a society.
My sense is that post traumatic depression (PTSD) has existed as long as man has killed man, and suffers the apprehension, indeed, the accelerating anxiety of escaping being killed with the depression of that reality which inevitably follows.
My sense, too, is that when a person has had a narrow escape from death, there is a posttraumatic realization that he is alive, causing a psychophysical shock to his system.
When I was in high school, and a basketball player, Del Ploen’s father took us to a basketball game in Davenport (Iowa) to scout our next opponent in the state high school regional tournament. I stepped off the curve near the fieldhouse and a car traveling at great speed almost hit me. It would have killed me. The realization of that, once it hit my conscious mind, threw me into a faint, and Del had to catch me before I fell to the pavement.
Imagine when that scenario, escaping from death is repeated day after day after day as is the case in a combat zone such as Iraq. The escape from that punishing reality is denial that is, pushing that reality far back from the conscious mind.
It is why, I suspect, combat veterans can become heavy smokers, drinkers, druggies, or lose their programmed civility and do terrible things, things that they would never think or imagine doing were they still totally in charge of their faculties.
You would think that the killing would be the cause of PTSD. I don’t think so. It is seeing body parts of your comrades on the road realizing that could have been me.
We demonize the enemy as being less than human and deserving being killed. It is the mantra:” kill or be killed!” Murder in war is justified homicide, and often gravitates to genocide. “We are protecting our way of life,” and the enemy is trying to take it from us.
When I was a boy, we took in renters during WWII. One was an outpatient at U.S. Schick General Army Hospital in my hometown. This ex-G.I. had a good deal of his butt shot off by a sniper at Guadalcanal.
My parents were good listeners, and I as well, often hiding behind the sofa, as he talked incessantly about his escape, while his buddies died. He talked about using flamethrowers to kill Japanese soldiers that made my hair stand on end, but that was not his concern. It was why had he escaped and not them. He was a wreck but I thought he was only strange. My mother told me one day, “Be kind to him. He is hurting, and remember, he is why you can grow up to be a man.”
What I remember most about that ex-G.I. is his eyes. They were wild, restless, and although I didn’t understand at the time, full of terror. He was still in that foxhole at Guadalcanal. My wonder now is how he would have behaved if ordered to return to the Pacific Theater during that war.
My reason for mentioning this is because the other night on “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer” on PBS the widow of a G.I., who had committed suicide, was interviewed.
She said her husband was fun and funny, and a joy to his children before he went to Iraq. He came home and he couldn’t sleep, yelled all the time, was critical of everything she did, and constantly badgered their two small daughters. The older daughter said one day, “You’re not my daddy. I want my daddy back.” This reduced him to tears.
The G.I. tried to be treated for PTSD but the Veterans Administration claimed he didn’t qualify. He sought help from a private psychiatrist, who prescribed medication, which his wife claimed did not help. Then, he was ordered to return to active duty in Iraq, and he committed suicide. He was twenty-six.
Incidentally, he had told VA counselors, according to his wife, that he saw buddies blown up in the Humvies with body parts all over the road. The VA counselors wanted to know the names and units of each of these incidents, and soldiers, something he was unable to deal with much less recall.
It was not the killing that was his anxiety; it was the dying.
From your question, I sense that you see it more in terms of the killing and not the escaping death.
My experience, and I should caution you again, is not from actual combat but from the proximity of it in 1957.
As a member of the US Navy Sixth Fleet, and as a hospital corpsman striker on the USS Salem CA-139, I was assigned to a company of US Marines as their corpsman when we were ready to go down the nets and into an LST to invade Port Said, Egypt in support of the British and French as they bombed the Suez Canal.
At the last moment, all of us in battle dress, President Dwight David Eisenhower withdrew support and commitment for this incursion. We were ordered to “stand down!” I nearly fainted. All I could think was that I would never see my son who was born while I was in the Mediterranean, that I would never be able to do all the things I had ambition to do. I was in shock and didn’t know it.
On the other hand, the Marines in my company were gun ho to kill some Egyptians. They were trained killers, fit, focused and fearless. They accepted me because I might help save their lives. It was funny in a way. Marines look down on sailors in general, but have a special bond with corpsmen, who have shown great bravery in battle with them. I felt hardly brave. I was terrified.
My experience, as you can see, is limited, but that G.I. mentioned here who committed suicide was a Marine Reserve.
The twenty-first century Veterans Administration does a fair if not excellent job in treating veterans with physical battle scars but it does an inadequate job treating veterans with invisible scars.
My parents were not educated, especially in matters of the mind as psychiatrists and psychologists are, but in retrospect, I think they saved that Guadalcanal veteran's life.
They stayed up for hours listening to him go over in minute detail the agony of his war. They didn’t interrupt or ask him embarrassing questions. He was a hero to them. He trusted them and increasingly talked about things that I didn’t understand, grown up things.
I think that young Marine that committed suicide might be alive today if he had had my parents to listen to him, to accept his pain, to share his horror, and let his mind release all its pent up confusion and see it dissipate into thin air.
More than 700 returning veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq have committed suicide, 700 men and women that escaped death in the battle zone only to have death haunt them and never release them from that horror once in the safety of their home environment.
Fear is something from which there is no escape but from which we can become self-estranged. We are supposed to be brave, but physical courage demands a separation from psychological fear. It is by embracing fear that we become brave, not by denying fear for fear is the mother of safety, not the opposite.
By a curious coincidence, most quotations with regard to fear are masked in the idea of evil, and not in the reality of mortality.
If we are truly in touch with the fact that we are all afraid of death, then we are ready to live. I have called this confident thinking.
If we are afraid to live a full life with all life's vicissitudes, then death haunts our ever move. There is no way to display confidence. We are obsessed with safety and there is no safety from death. Death is inevitable. There is safety in fear because it is Life’s providence.
It is ironic but true that people who are devoted to death defying feats are actually afraid of life. It is how they cope with fear.
It is also why the theater of violent sport is so appealing. It is a way to experience pain and danger vicariously. We have become a spectator society to life finding it more appealing to live vicariously through others we make celebrity because they live the glamorous dangerous existence to which we prefer fantazie.
It is a substitute for an active life without the pain of the reality of being hurt, disappointed, embarrassed or possibly destroyed. Why do you think scandal magazines are so popular? The scandalized are doing what we fear but find tantalizing.
The Roman Empire understood this syndrome and used it by having gladiators fight to the death in amphitheaters filled with passive spectators.
We haven’t made much progress with all our electronic and technological wonders at understanding our mortal selves. We have opted for distractions, not realizing that the less actively we are engaged in life the less fulfilling it can be. And what is the greatest problem of modern society? Depression. It is as if Mother Nature is telling us there is no escape from fear. So, use it!
Sunday, November 16, 2008
IMPLICIT ENEMIES OF LEADERSHIP -- PROSPERITY & DEMISE OF CHARACTER
IMPLICIT ENEMIES OF LEADERSHIP – PROSPERITY & DEMISE OF CHARACTER
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 16, 2008
“Nothing is harder to direct than a man in prosperity; nothing more easily managed than one in adversity.”
Plutarch (46 – 120 c.e.), Greek biographer
On January 20, 2009, Barak Obama will be sworn in as the forty-fourth president of the United States. He will be proclaimed the most powerful leader in the world. National polls, an Americans are addicted to polls indicated that 72 percent of the American people expect the new president to lift us out of this economic tailspin and restore the nation to health, wealth, happiness and prosperity.
Prosperity is the key word in this lexicon because Americans equate health, wealth and happiness with their economic well being. Nearly five million American homeowners are in foreclosure. Another addiction, large gas guzzling automobiles getting 18 mpg or less have changed their driving habits as gasoline fluctuates in price. The whole financial system that was taken for granted has collapsed with a bailout that may ultimately approach a $trillion of taxpayers money. The bailout at its current level represents an assessment of $3,500 for every living American in this country of some 320 million.
This current weekend leaders of the G-20 major and emerging nations of the world are convening in Washington, D.C. to summit an action plan to reverse this economic hemorrhaging. Constant reference is being made to the global financial crisis during WWII in which Allied nations met at Bretton Woods to create post-WWII economic policy. At that conference, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank were created with the dollar secured to the gold standard as the world’s reserve currency.
There are a lot of expected outcomes already apparent. We as human beings are very good at defining the cause of a crisis after the crisis has occurred. We are failures at anticipating the crisis for reason to which I will return shortly. The G-20 leaders claim the crisis was caused by a failure of investors to understand the risks they were taking. I don’t think so. They preferred to deny the risks.
Once the horse is out of the barn, it is easy to come up with consensus schemes to get the horse back in the barn. G-20 leaders plan to stabilize banks and boost growth; improve regulation; bring more voices having impact on finances into the forum, be more sensible about trade policy, and meet regularly. This is the equivalent of securing the barn so the horse will be safely cared for in a secure building.
WHY DO LEADERS NOT LEAD?
The easy answer would be because they can’t, and I’ve submitted that before. But I’ve learned it has more to do with human nature: why lead when you don’t have to?
Leadership – with all the books to the contrary – is simply a matter of character. We as a species have survived on this hostile planet individually and collectively because of our character more than any other factor. What is character?
Character are those basic attributes of survival in which the individual is totally in touch with the reality of his experience and the dangers and pitfalls of that ambience. Character has everything to do with struggle with the instinct for survival against predators around every corner, above and below, and even within breathing distance. You can feel danger before it touches you. There is a primitive warning system that is generated by the mind-body complex that radiates an invisible protective shield.
Once these predators were wild beast when we had little more than our moxie to survive a predatory world that operated totally on instinct. We could feel danger, taste danger, as the hair on the back of our heads would stand at attention. It was as if we had eyes in the back of our heads. We used this intelligence 50,000 or 100,000 years ago to arrive where we are today.
But of course the predators no longer were wild beast but the beast in the human heart. Countless ages in man’s history found leaders using this mechanism of fear as a prescription for control down to our day. These leaders broke from the pack to explain night and day, thunder and lightning, floods and draughts, hurricanes and tornadoes, things we feared because we didn’t understand. The formula is the same today only the data has changed.
We anoint those that can explain things to our satisfaction with power, privilege, status and exemption from the mundane struggles that are indigenous to life. What has happened over the centuries is that those accustomed to power have learned that the most obvious action on their part to sustain power is to make the powerless even less powerless or more dependent. What better way to do that than to increase comfort, reduce struggle, and make them less aware of who and what and where they are. Put otherwise, to become an anodyne to that primitive mechanism that kept them alert to danger 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.
Every religion, every monarchy, every totalitarian state, and all the marauding bands of warriors back through and before the Dark Ages of Europe have used this formula to success. It is leadership as man has known it and has become a toxic component in post-modernity in all governments with a sprinkling of the DNA of all these previous ages.
EVIDENCE OF FAILED LEADERSHIP – PANDEMONIUM OF PENALTY OF DELAY
It has been a knee jerk reaction to crisis management all my life: when you don’t know what the problem is and don’t want to go to the trouble to define it properly, throw money at it. We have thrown money at education and we spend the most and have more failed students in math and language skills than any other G-7 nation. Our teachers can’t teach so we throw more money at teachers and they get worse.
Now, Secretary of Treasurer Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke composed a three-page memo to bailout Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae with what have ballooned to over $150 billion. Then it was AIG that first received $40 billion, which that has also increased, and yet the foreclosures and failures in real estate mount. Now, at the eleventh hour, these two leaders have decided not to assume toxic debts of banks but to turn to relieving citizens of credit card debt and home loans directly. Why? Because fluidity has not occurred with this gigantic cash flow into lending institutions. They are holding on to the money waiting for the prime rate to go up. Predators and prey understand this primitive game if leaders don’t.
In our society, we equate brains, culture, education and experience with character. They are not the same animal. They cannot be equated.
Character understands the dark sides of man’s nature, the primitive fears that lurk in his primitive brain stem. He doesn’t deny them. He uses them. It may make him at times melancholy and depressed because he sees reality so clearly, and is not fooled by the moment. Character has not only been excised from our leaders (I’ll mention some exceptions), but from ourselves. I write in my best and shortest book THE WORKER, ALONE! (Delta Group 1995):
“The worker is on his own nickel, and there is no savior, no god, no protector to shield him from the crush of history, from the inevitable force of reality, other than himself. What is missing in a lack of attention to fear. Workers are afraid to lead fuller lives, not because they embrace fear, but because they deny it by preoccupation with distractions. I understand fear. Fear runs through my body the way sap runs through a tree. I am attentive to fear each day of my life, for that day may be my last. Were I not so attentive I might be distracted and go to my grave without expressing these sentiments. Fear is a powerful positive in my life. It keeps me attentive. It finds me taking life seriously, but not myself.”
Paulson and Bernanke claimed the $700 billion bailout was necessary to save us from another Great Depression. This is the fear game played by actors with brains, culture, education and experience but little character. They are flying by the seat of their pants and expecting us to keep them air bound. To oppose the bailout is made unpatriotic, anti-American and anti-capitalistic. Witch doctors used the same strategy thousands of years ago.
In the 1950s, when General Motors was king, and WWII had successfully been concluded, Charlie Wilson, then CEO of GM said, “As GM goes so goes America.” It was the hubris of an industry on top of the world looking down with reason: one out of every eight jobs (outside farming) in the United States was tied to the automotive industry.
The United Auto Workers Union (UAW) had similar hubris and clout. It punished its employers with worker entitlements and demands not associated with productivity. The automotive conceded because it was willing to give anything as long as the UAW didn’t demand control of the workplace. It was as elicit a bargain as any devised between workers and management. It killed the spirit of creative work and a sense of ownership. What was getting, not giving became a measure of pride and status. Workers became renters, not owners of what they did, but the best paid workers in the world.
Today, some fifty years later, the stock of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are all in the single digits moving precariously toward zero and bankruptcy or possibly extinction.
Detroit now wants some of this $700 billion. For starters, they have requested a modest $25 billion for retooling. This would be funny is it weren’t so tragic.
Two things haunt Detroit today: (1) its failure to retool; and (2) the enormous UAW contracts with present autoworkers and millions of automotive retirees today. But is this fair? Of course, it isn’t. It is far more complex. What is apparent, however, is that Detroit didn’t lead because it didn’t believe it had to lead.
Speaking from experience, the squeaky wheel doesn’t get oiled. The messenger gets tarred and feathered or worse, sent into the wilderness.
I watched Apple Computer almost go under when Steven Jobs brought in the CEO of Pepsi Cola fame, John Sculley, a brand that had not changed in its history. Sculley was an enabler like a doting father, forgiving indiscretions and failed deadlines, parenting his brood like he had at Pepsi, masterminding advertising campaigns. The latter was key to Pepsi’s success, not innovation.
Electronics are outdated as soon as they roll off the assembling line. Jobs, pesky, brutal, brash, brilliant, a workaholic and an innovator of the first magnitude, understood this but didn’t understand his own character and culture. Apple’s success was predicated on knowing the business and being a creature of it.
Thomas Friedman, the print guru of the world is flat suggests that Steven Jobs would make a good candidate to run “GM iCar.” It is clever but it wouldn’t work, won’t work, and I hope no one takes this absurdity to heart.
LEADERSHIP – CHARACTER WRITTEN LARGE
To restore the American automotive industry, or America’s way through this crisis is to find leaders within the cultures not outside of them, and these leaders will possess CHARACTER written large
What do I mean? I have tendency to go on and on, so let me address the automotive industry in the hopes that the reader will extrapolate what I say about it to the wider business of leadership in these United States.
First of all, $25 billion would be like pouring piss down a drain. Before you know it, this amount would be three times, four times and as many as ten times this number. This is not the age of Lee Iaccoca fame and the Congressional bailout of Chrysler. Toyota is now bigger than Chrysler ever was in these United States with plants sprinkled across the country. That was not so in the 1970s.
The automotive industry says 2.5 million jobs will be lost. I don’t think so. They will be changed. People will be forced to struggle to learn new skills. The creative verve of the American worker will have to be leveraged. It is there waiting to be energized.
The sins of the automotive industry must be acknowledged and not repeated. The technology for 60-mpg automobiles has existed for decades. Instead exploiting this technology, the automotive industry has lobbied expensively and diligently to oppose legislation to increase mpg of new automobiles.
A score of years ago, I wrote WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (Delta Group 1990) pointing out that America’s big gas guzzling boats as automobiles couldn’t negotiate many of European city streets. I found it ludicrous as I watched a Cadillac tried to make a u-turn in one of these streets without success, and wrote about it. In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t imagine that Americans would build SUV’s as big as tanks making the earlier Cadillac look like a toy by comparison.
Fuel efficiency has never been a Detroit priority; making money has, and the American consumer has cooperated in this fantasy as it has always been enamored of big cars and trucks as phallic symbols of its virility and fertility.
The United States Congress cannot be left off the hook as it has been responsive to the demands of these high paid automotive lobbyists, who have winked at the gas guzzlers and talked corporate speak when challenged about doing nothing about the problem.
So, in essence, the problem in the automotive industry has been one of collusion between the automaker, the American auto consumer, and the American Congress. Now, when push comes to shove, the American consumer as citizen is expected to carry the burden. It is the old American rubric: actions don’t necessarily have consequences. Americans have gotten away with narcissism and self-indulgence for more than a century, why not now? I called this “the crippled genius of the American character.” I write in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS:
“The American character, in truth, remains that of a child. And like a child, the focus of America’s existence has always been on becoming rather than on being; on the competitive drive, rather than the spirit of cooperation; on the preferred role of spectator to the participant; on the illusion of progress rather than reality. . Man’s primary motivation is to contribute not to consume. Capitalism makes the wish to have and to use the most dominant of human desires. A man so dominated is a crippled genius with the ambition to acquire overpowering his desire to accomplish. Yet, neither private property nor profit is man’s mission, but the free unfolding of his human powers. As Erich Fromm puts it, ‘Not the man who has much, but the man who is much is the fully developed truly human being.’”
The reader will think this harsh. Imagine how the reader thought of it twenty years ago. But twenty years ago, there was a billion less people in the world; China and India had not yet emerged as great manufacturing and marketing centers; and American manufacturing had not yet become a hallow industry.
SO WHAT?
So, the United States is now a world player and no longer the only world player.
The subprime fiasco has seeded a worldwide meltdown with industry and industry collapsing as if dominoes.
People such as myself were born in the Great Depression. Some of us came from very little. We never got caught up in living beyond our means. We saw the importance of education and sacrifice and struggle. We accepted failure and setbacks and disappointments in stride because we had no choice.
There was no safety net, no fall back position. If we fell on our faces, we had no choice but to pick ourselves up and go forward.
Teachers slapped us around when we needed to be slapped around, and we didn’t go home to our parents and tell on them. If we did, it wouldn’t have done any good. Our parents would inevitably have sided with the teachers.
If we screwed up in school and got into trouble, we were expelled. That was the end of it. We could never get back in that school.
If we didn’t do our schoolwork, we got a failed grade. No written excuse from our parents would change that.
If we didn’t pass our tests we weren’t promoted. Some students stayed in the same grade two or three times, and no one got excited about it.
There was a finality to the system that no longer exists.
College students can take over courses they have failed or gotten low grades in and replace those grades with better performance.
There were no SAT’s or GRE’s in our day, so there were no SAT or GRE crib courses for such exams to get a ballooned score. We parents have always thought these crib courses were ludicrous. If the course work in school didn’t measure performance, what did? Certainly not a high SAT score!
Incidentally, an “A” average in school today would probably be no more than a high “C” average fifty years ago.
If you cheated on a test, then you got a failed grade. If you cheated again, you were expelled. It happened all the time.
I remember a star football player stole out of another student’s locker and was caught. It was his first offense. He was sent for two years to the State’s Reformatory for Boys.
It was tough. It was real. Behavior had consequences. It built character and, yes, modesty and moderation. And it produced leaders with modest demands.
Evidence of this is that fifty years ago the average executive salary was five times that of the worker, but the CEO’s salary could be as much as ten times. Today, CEO salaries with bonuses can be 1,000 times that of workers.
The whole process over the last fifty years has compromised character and character is leadership, and when character is nonexistent, you have the crises that we have experienced in recent times.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 16, 2008
“Nothing is harder to direct than a man in prosperity; nothing more easily managed than one in adversity.”
Plutarch (46 – 120 c.e.), Greek biographer
On January 20, 2009, Barak Obama will be sworn in as the forty-fourth president of the United States. He will be proclaimed the most powerful leader in the world. National polls, an Americans are addicted to polls indicated that 72 percent of the American people expect the new president to lift us out of this economic tailspin and restore the nation to health, wealth, happiness and prosperity.
Prosperity is the key word in this lexicon because Americans equate health, wealth and happiness with their economic well being. Nearly five million American homeowners are in foreclosure. Another addiction, large gas guzzling automobiles getting 18 mpg or less have changed their driving habits as gasoline fluctuates in price. The whole financial system that was taken for granted has collapsed with a bailout that may ultimately approach a $trillion of taxpayers money. The bailout at its current level represents an assessment of $3,500 for every living American in this country of some 320 million.
This current weekend leaders of the G-20 major and emerging nations of the world are convening in Washington, D.C. to summit an action plan to reverse this economic hemorrhaging. Constant reference is being made to the global financial crisis during WWII in which Allied nations met at Bretton Woods to create post-WWII economic policy. At that conference, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank were created with the dollar secured to the gold standard as the world’s reserve currency.
There are a lot of expected outcomes already apparent. We as human beings are very good at defining the cause of a crisis after the crisis has occurred. We are failures at anticipating the crisis for reason to which I will return shortly. The G-20 leaders claim the crisis was caused by a failure of investors to understand the risks they were taking. I don’t think so. They preferred to deny the risks.
Once the horse is out of the barn, it is easy to come up with consensus schemes to get the horse back in the barn. G-20 leaders plan to stabilize banks and boost growth; improve regulation; bring more voices having impact on finances into the forum, be more sensible about trade policy, and meet regularly. This is the equivalent of securing the barn so the horse will be safely cared for in a secure building.
WHY DO LEADERS NOT LEAD?
The easy answer would be because they can’t, and I’ve submitted that before. But I’ve learned it has more to do with human nature: why lead when you don’t have to?
Leadership – with all the books to the contrary – is simply a matter of character. We as a species have survived on this hostile planet individually and collectively because of our character more than any other factor. What is character?
Character are those basic attributes of survival in which the individual is totally in touch with the reality of his experience and the dangers and pitfalls of that ambience. Character has everything to do with struggle with the instinct for survival against predators around every corner, above and below, and even within breathing distance. You can feel danger before it touches you. There is a primitive warning system that is generated by the mind-body complex that radiates an invisible protective shield.
Once these predators were wild beast when we had little more than our moxie to survive a predatory world that operated totally on instinct. We could feel danger, taste danger, as the hair on the back of our heads would stand at attention. It was as if we had eyes in the back of our heads. We used this intelligence 50,000 or 100,000 years ago to arrive where we are today.
But of course the predators no longer were wild beast but the beast in the human heart. Countless ages in man’s history found leaders using this mechanism of fear as a prescription for control down to our day. These leaders broke from the pack to explain night and day, thunder and lightning, floods and draughts, hurricanes and tornadoes, things we feared because we didn’t understand. The formula is the same today only the data has changed.
We anoint those that can explain things to our satisfaction with power, privilege, status and exemption from the mundane struggles that are indigenous to life. What has happened over the centuries is that those accustomed to power have learned that the most obvious action on their part to sustain power is to make the powerless even less powerless or more dependent. What better way to do that than to increase comfort, reduce struggle, and make them less aware of who and what and where they are. Put otherwise, to become an anodyne to that primitive mechanism that kept them alert to danger 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.
Every religion, every monarchy, every totalitarian state, and all the marauding bands of warriors back through and before the Dark Ages of Europe have used this formula to success. It is leadership as man has known it and has become a toxic component in post-modernity in all governments with a sprinkling of the DNA of all these previous ages.
EVIDENCE OF FAILED LEADERSHIP – PANDEMONIUM OF PENALTY OF DELAY
It has been a knee jerk reaction to crisis management all my life: when you don’t know what the problem is and don’t want to go to the trouble to define it properly, throw money at it. We have thrown money at education and we spend the most and have more failed students in math and language skills than any other G-7 nation. Our teachers can’t teach so we throw more money at teachers and they get worse.
Now, Secretary of Treasurer Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke composed a three-page memo to bailout Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae with what have ballooned to over $150 billion. Then it was AIG that first received $40 billion, which that has also increased, and yet the foreclosures and failures in real estate mount. Now, at the eleventh hour, these two leaders have decided not to assume toxic debts of banks but to turn to relieving citizens of credit card debt and home loans directly. Why? Because fluidity has not occurred with this gigantic cash flow into lending institutions. They are holding on to the money waiting for the prime rate to go up. Predators and prey understand this primitive game if leaders don’t.
In our society, we equate brains, culture, education and experience with character. They are not the same animal. They cannot be equated.
Character understands the dark sides of man’s nature, the primitive fears that lurk in his primitive brain stem. He doesn’t deny them. He uses them. It may make him at times melancholy and depressed because he sees reality so clearly, and is not fooled by the moment. Character has not only been excised from our leaders (I’ll mention some exceptions), but from ourselves. I write in my best and shortest book THE WORKER, ALONE! (Delta Group 1995):
“The worker is on his own nickel, and there is no savior, no god, no protector to shield him from the crush of history, from the inevitable force of reality, other than himself. What is missing in a lack of attention to fear. Workers are afraid to lead fuller lives, not because they embrace fear, but because they deny it by preoccupation with distractions. I understand fear. Fear runs through my body the way sap runs through a tree. I am attentive to fear each day of my life, for that day may be my last. Were I not so attentive I might be distracted and go to my grave without expressing these sentiments. Fear is a powerful positive in my life. It keeps me attentive. It finds me taking life seriously, but not myself.”
Paulson and Bernanke claimed the $700 billion bailout was necessary to save us from another Great Depression. This is the fear game played by actors with brains, culture, education and experience but little character. They are flying by the seat of their pants and expecting us to keep them air bound. To oppose the bailout is made unpatriotic, anti-American and anti-capitalistic. Witch doctors used the same strategy thousands of years ago.
In the 1950s, when General Motors was king, and WWII had successfully been concluded, Charlie Wilson, then CEO of GM said, “As GM goes so goes America.” It was the hubris of an industry on top of the world looking down with reason: one out of every eight jobs (outside farming) in the United States was tied to the automotive industry.
The United Auto Workers Union (UAW) had similar hubris and clout. It punished its employers with worker entitlements and demands not associated with productivity. The automotive conceded because it was willing to give anything as long as the UAW didn’t demand control of the workplace. It was as elicit a bargain as any devised between workers and management. It killed the spirit of creative work and a sense of ownership. What was getting, not giving became a measure of pride and status. Workers became renters, not owners of what they did, but the best paid workers in the world.
Today, some fifty years later, the stock of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler are all in the single digits moving precariously toward zero and bankruptcy or possibly extinction.
Detroit now wants some of this $700 billion. For starters, they have requested a modest $25 billion for retooling. This would be funny is it weren’t so tragic.
Two things haunt Detroit today: (1) its failure to retool; and (2) the enormous UAW contracts with present autoworkers and millions of automotive retirees today. But is this fair? Of course, it isn’t. It is far more complex. What is apparent, however, is that Detroit didn’t lead because it didn’t believe it had to lead.
Speaking from experience, the squeaky wheel doesn’t get oiled. The messenger gets tarred and feathered or worse, sent into the wilderness.
I watched Apple Computer almost go under when Steven Jobs brought in the CEO of Pepsi Cola fame, John Sculley, a brand that had not changed in its history. Sculley was an enabler like a doting father, forgiving indiscretions and failed deadlines, parenting his brood like he had at Pepsi, masterminding advertising campaigns. The latter was key to Pepsi’s success, not innovation.
Electronics are outdated as soon as they roll off the assembling line. Jobs, pesky, brutal, brash, brilliant, a workaholic and an innovator of the first magnitude, understood this but didn’t understand his own character and culture. Apple’s success was predicated on knowing the business and being a creature of it.
Thomas Friedman, the print guru of the world is flat suggests that Steven Jobs would make a good candidate to run “GM iCar.” It is clever but it wouldn’t work, won’t work, and I hope no one takes this absurdity to heart.
LEADERSHIP – CHARACTER WRITTEN LARGE
To restore the American automotive industry, or America’s way through this crisis is to find leaders within the cultures not outside of them, and these leaders will possess CHARACTER written large
What do I mean? I have tendency to go on and on, so let me address the automotive industry in the hopes that the reader will extrapolate what I say about it to the wider business of leadership in these United States.
First of all, $25 billion would be like pouring piss down a drain. Before you know it, this amount would be three times, four times and as many as ten times this number. This is not the age of Lee Iaccoca fame and the Congressional bailout of Chrysler. Toyota is now bigger than Chrysler ever was in these United States with plants sprinkled across the country. That was not so in the 1970s.
The automotive industry says 2.5 million jobs will be lost. I don’t think so. They will be changed. People will be forced to struggle to learn new skills. The creative verve of the American worker will have to be leveraged. It is there waiting to be energized.
The sins of the automotive industry must be acknowledged and not repeated. The technology for 60-mpg automobiles has existed for decades. Instead exploiting this technology, the automotive industry has lobbied expensively and diligently to oppose legislation to increase mpg of new automobiles.
A score of years ago, I wrote WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (Delta Group 1990) pointing out that America’s big gas guzzling boats as automobiles couldn’t negotiate many of European city streets. I found it ludicrous as I watched a Cadillac tried to make a u-turn in one of these streets without success, and wrote about it. In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t imagine that Americans would build SUV’s as big as tanks making the earlier Cadillac look like a toy by comparison.
Fuel efficiency has never been a Detroit priority; making money has, and the American consumer has cooperated in this fantasy as it has always been enamored of big cars and trucks as phallic symbols of its virility and fertility.
The United States Congress cannot be left off the hook as it has been responsive to the demands of these high paid automotive lobbyists, who have winked at the gas guzzlers and talked corporate speak when challenged about doing nothing about the problem.
So, in essence, the problem in the automotive industry has been one of collusion between the automaker, the American auto consumer, and the American Congress. Now, when push comes to shove, the American consumer as citizen is expected to carry the burden. It is the old American rubric: actions don’t necessarily have consequences. Americans have gotten away with narcissism and self-indulgence for more than a century, why not now? I called this “the crippled genius of the American character.” I write in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS:
“The American character, in truth, remains that of a child. And like a child, the focus of America’s existence has always been on becoming rather than on being; on the competitive drive, rather than the spirit of cooperation; on the preferred role of spectator to the participant; on the illusion of progress rather than reality. . Man’s primary motivation is to contribute not to consume. Capitalism makes the wish to have and to use the most dominant of human desires. A man so dominated is a crippled genius with the ambition to acquire overpowering his desire to accomplish. Yet, neither private property nor profit is man’s mission, but the free unfolding of his human powers. As Erich Fromm puts it, ‘Not the man who has much, but the man who is much is the fully developed truly human being.’”
The reader will think this harsh. Imagine how the reader thought of it twenty years ago. But twenty years ago, there was a billion less people in the world; China and India had not yet emerged as great manufacturing and marketing centers; and American manufacturing had not yet become a hallow industry.
SO WHAT?
So, the United States is now a world player and no longer the only world player.
The subprime fiasco has seeded a worldwide meltdown with industry and industry collapsing as if dominoes.
People such as myself were born in the Great Depression. Some of us came from very little. We never got caught up in living beyond our means. We saw the importance of education and sacrifice and struggle. We accepted failure and setbacks and disappointments in stride because we had no choice.
There was no safety net, no fall back position. If we fell on our faces, we had no choice but to pick ourselves up and go forward.
Teachers slapped us around when we needed to be slapped around, and we didn’t go home to our parents and tell on them. If we did, it wouldn’t have done any good. Our parents would inevitably have sided with the teachers.
If we screwed up in school and got into trouble, we were expelled. That was the end of it. We could never get back in that school.
If we didn’t do our schoolwork, we got a failed grade. No written excuse from our parents would change that.
If we didn’t pass our tests we weren’t promoted. Some students stayed in the same grade two or three times, and no one got excited about it.
There was a finality to the system that no longer exists.
College students can take over courses they have failed or gotten low grades in and replace those grades with better performance.
There were no SAT’s or GRE’s in our day, so there were no SAT or GRE crib courses for such exams to get a ballooned score. We parents have always thought these crib courses were ludicrous. If the course work in school didn’t measure performance, what did? Certainly not a high SAT score!
Incidentally, an “A” average in school today would probably be no more than a high “C” average fifty years ago.
If you cheated on a test, then you got a failed grade. If you cheated again, you were expelled. It happened all the time.
I remember a star football player stole out of another student’s locker and was caught. It was his first offense. He was sent for two years to the State’s Reformatory for Boys.
It was tough. It was real. Behavior had consequences. It built character and, yes, modesty and moderation. And it produced leaders with modest demands.
Evidence of this is that fifty years ago the average executive salary was five times that of the worker, but the CEO’s salary could be as much as ten times. Today, CEO salaries with bonuses can be 1,000 times that of workers.
The whole process over the last fifty years has compromised character and character is leadership, and when character is nonexistent, you have the crises that we have experienced in recent times.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO YOURSELF -- THE WILL TO POWER & BANKRUPTCY OF DESPAIR
LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO YOURSELF – THE WILL TO POWER & BANKRUPTCY OF DESPAIR
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 11, 2008
(Veterans Day in these United States of America)
“The strong are those who are more complete as human beings, who have learnt to channel the will to power into a creative force.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900), German philosopher and psychologist
“Intentionally serving one’s own interests one unintentionally serves the interests of society as a whole.”
Adam Smith (1723 – 1790), Scottish economist and philosopher
PREAMBLE
The recent election of Barak Obama to the American presidency to take office on January 20, 2008 has been contentious to say the least. It has generated levels of emotions from individuals, I suspect, who were not aware of harboring emotions of such construction.
The election represents an unprecedented event in American politics by elevating a black man to the highest office of the land. It was bound to generate massive conflict between “what was” and “what is, is.” Internet legends have painted Obama, the man, his mind, his race, and his family with a broad brush in the most compromising terms.
Is he a liberal? Well, his voting record certainly was as liberal as was that of Senator Ted Kennedy.
The labels "liberal" and "conservative" have become terms so ambivalent to be meaningless.
If Senator Kennedy had acted more sensibly a long time ago, few doubt he would not have been our president. Senator Kennedy, of course, is white.
On the night of July 19, 1969 with fog rolling in, senator Ted Kennedy while traveling with Mary Jo Kopechne, an office aid, ran off the Chapaquitic Bridge and the young lady drowned a week before her 29th birthday.
In the nearly forty years that have passed since that terrible night, the ghost of suspicion has haunted the Massachusetts senator. Meanwhile, he has become one of the most effective senators in American history. That is not my assessment but American historians of both liberal and conservative persuasion.
The response that is to follow was a response to my missive, “Two Champions in the Service of Others.” I should warn you in advance that it is as candid as it is visceral. It comes from a person I’ve known for nearly thirty years, a person I love like a son. He is one of the most gifted and authentic people I have had the pleasure of knowing.
All morning today I have pondered his response to my missive. Part of me wanted to go on working on my novel; another felt it too important to take a pass.
My friend takes a quote from my missive and then introduces me to a side of him I have known was there, but was never expressed before with such force. It represents a theme of fear bordering on despair for an uncertain future. I know that I cannot reassure him, or assuage his doubt as he contemplates the election.
These are troubling times no less because we Americans associate prestige and security with power and money. For the majority of Americans, who never experienced the Great Depression, these are unchartered waters.
We are a shallow society because we could afford to be shallow. We have gotten by looking at most matters that concern us with the profoundly of skin deep. It is refreshing to see an exception to this in honest prose. When we make contact with our devils that devour us, we discover our angels who liberate us.
My children are not and never have been readers. I sense that many of my generation are reluctant readers as well, and that is sad, especially as it relates to our American history and the presidency.
President Teddy Roosevelt liberalized Negro access to jobs and opportunity then president Woodrow Wilson reverse that liberalization.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt attacked the Great Depression with a number of programs, and is honored for taking us out of it. Actually, he never lifted us out of the economic downturn. WWII did that. However, FDR did institute Social Security and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to ensure the savings of Americans.
President John F. Kennedy, the Camelot president, got us into many fracases, including sending military trainers to Vietnam, while doing little to promote the Civil Rights Movement. JFK did initiate, however, the program that got us to the moon within the decade of his administration.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, much maligned, orchestrated a massive Civil Rights transformation. The Obama presidency is its fruition and LBJ's legacy. But he is best remembered for the debacle of the Vietnam War and his dissembling of it.
President Richard Nixon gave us Watergate, but he also opened the gates to China.
President George W. Bush stewarded the highest deficit in American history by any president, Democratic or Republican. He ran on a platform of compassionate conservatism, which failed to show in domestic or foreign policy, that is, with one overlooked exception, Africa. There he has proven compassionate with billions of dollars of aid toward medical relief and educational support, especially against the AIDS epidemic.
Good intentions seldom translate into expected or obvious outcomes in a state of accelerating tension or catastrophic demands, such as 9/11. When that occurs, ghosts unacknowledged are likely to surface. The Iraq War of 2003 at the expense of the Afghanistan War was less about oil or 9/11 than about getting even by Bush43 for the failure of Bush41 in the first Iraq War of 1991.
We are a people, a society, a community, and a culture that has never been introduced to itself. We have had the luxury of basking in self-ignorance for most of our history without debilitating consequences. Now, apologies for self-aggrandizement and self-indulgence no longer cut it. Consequences have consequences.
The penalty of delay can be put off only so long. The world is changing, and we have refused to change with it because we could or we believed we could. That is no longer the case. We are not the center of the world anymore than the Catholic Church once claimed the earth was the center of the universe. As Nietzsche says, “We are all too human,” and so it is with our presidents as it is with all of us.
It has been my experience in a long life that our presidents have reflected the mind, mood and manner of the American people at that point in time.
When I was consulting police organizations from New York City to Miami in the 1970s as an organization development (OD) psychologist, I read a quote once from author Joseph Wambaugh (a former Los Angeles police sergeant): “A community gets the police force it deserves.” I found that only too true. Paraphrasing, “American voters acquire the leadership they need when they are ready.”
A WRITER WRITES:
“The test now will be for those uncomfortable with the roll (and I mean roll, not role so it's not a misprint) of history to get on board and support the new president.”
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., from, “Two Champions in the Service of Others,” November 10, 2008
Guys like me don’t take offense we take action.
If your guy and his krewe are “rolling” where they say they are, I will aggressively resist him by all and whatever means possible.
Recall that close to half of us did NOT sign up for his program. To Wit, I’m meeting w/ my broker at noon today to liquidate my 401K’s. Friday is the first closing liquidating my real estate investments.
The battle isn’t over it’s just starting. Socialism and freedom are incompatible, and I for one, choose the latter, even if it means I end up living in a trailer.
There’s a long way to go before we determine where history is rolling. My fear: socialism leads to economic collapse leads to social disorder out of which comes an authoritarian. The Republic is gone. Freedom is gone. Sound familiar?
I’m all for charity, in fact I believe it’s crucial for a healthy soul. When the fruits of my labors do go to charities, I decide who and when – not Obama or the American electorate.
What I would give freely, I will destroy or give away before I let you take it. Anybody can be liberal with somebody else’s wallet – give me yours and I’ll demonstrate. Leaders go first. Let them donate their millions to the cause and maybe some of us Neanderthals will reconsider.
Believe it or not, I have a little inner Democrat residual from my upbringing (and I pay a price for it in business).
I would support their efforts if they went into the uncompetitive areas and addressed the root problems, but they don’t do that. They use public money to buy votes and breed Democrats. They ride discontent as a means to power, but the poor remain poor.
They’re the ‘friend of the little guy’ like a drug dealer is a friend to the junkie. Shame on the Republicans for being crooks; shame more on the Democrats for exploiting the poor and ignorant for their own aggrandizement.
Your guy in MacDonald’s is going to be pretty dejected when his life changes not one iota for Obama’s election.
It’s great America elected a black guy, but it’s going to be horrible if that black guy fails miserably or much worse, gets shot by some a.hole. Either could break the spirit of black people for fifty years.
Enjoy the flak troublemaker.
E
PS And just for the record, I don’t give a rat’s ass what he looks like, where his people came from, whether he’s Christian, Muslim or Heathen, or who he beds with as long as it’s not my daughter. Neither do I hate him or anyone else; it’s not an emotional issue. It’s a development in my environment to be dealt with like any other. Thus spake the selfish, racist hate-monger, clinging desperately to my guns and religion.
DR. FISHER RESPONDS
It is actually comforting to hear vehemence expressed so forthrightly. I would imagine many could identify with the fear and despair (of the future) expressed here.
So, you are not alone, but that does not make you right. Once a boil is lanced the pressure released, it signals relief as the healing process commences. I sense healing in your wrath.
It would be dishonest to say I don't find your words disturbing. I do and they are. I suspect many Americans who have seen their portfolios shrink, as have BB and I, are troubled. No question, we are in unknown territory and fear is palpable. It was not of Senator Obama's making, however, nor the president's, but the body of complicit Americans everywhere. We own it and now an African American senator wants to take charge of it. Why? It goes back to power, self-interest, and immortality. Few want to climb that mountain, but it is tantamount to an addiction to a type.
President-elect Barak Obama, as I have said elsewhere, reminds me of corpocracy and the pyramid climbers I have worked with and for in the corporation.
Like them, I suspect the president-elect saw the pyramid as a series of boxes to be checked off to move on, and he has done that starting with acquiring a quality education, becoming well read and articulate, a quick study, and an exploiter of power where he found it, being little concerned of its legitimacy or illegitimacy. It’s very Machiavellian, very American, and the embodiment of corpocracy, only now by a black man.
I’ve seen the type consistently rise to the top. It was true of JFK, and his rise, as it was in a more prosaic sense by my last boss with Honeywell Europe, Ltd.
I’m betting president-elect Obama will be different. I’ve read him, heard him speak, watched him behave under intense scrutiny and pressure, and I find him resilient. Profundity has penetrated his superficiality.
Am I right? We shall see. I have enjoyed a lifetime of successfully sizing up people, and not being surprised. Granted, I don’t have access to Obama that I have had to others, and must project my sense of him. But I’ve used the “Fisher Paradigm” on him, which includes (1) personality profile; (2) geographic profile; and (3) demographic profile; and I find him the man for the times.
What surprises me the most about your anger is your failure to acknowledge your anger as the driver in your discourse. Anger is a good emotion, powerful emotion, even an important emotion.
You claim not to be emotional. That gives you away. Your engineering mind has failed to introduce you to yourself beyond your filigree of algorithms. You express the intensity of your emotions, forcing me to read between the lines, to calibrate their impact on you.
We live in a social democracy. One day you will receive social security checks reliably every month, checks well beyond what you have put into the system if you live as long as I have lived. I don’t send them back. I cash and use them. I am a socialist. The FDIC ensures my savings accounts at no expense to me. The drugs I have to take now that I am old are from pharmaceutical research largely funded by the federal government. I could go on and on and write a document of several pages outlining all the social programs of the federal, state and local government to which I am a benefactor.
So much of what we call “free enterprise” is so subsidized by the federal government that it is ludicrous to throw darts at socialistic practices when every democratic republic on earth is largely if not ideologically socialistic in character.
As for the shrinking of 401K accounts, we collectively have all been active or complicit in seeing the economic bubble burst, another failure to introduce us to our lives and the reality of our experience.
My 401K account in October 1987, when I was working in Europe, lost 60 percent of its value when Wall Street crashed. When I got around to using it after retiring in 1990, all the loss was recovered and then some. I never touched it between October 1987 and July 1990. I have had an insane idea all my life that I could never be as poor as I was as a youth, and in my more than seven decades that has proven the wisdom of my insecurity.
China and India didn’t start in 2000 to roar into being; nor did Europe suddenly break its complacency over night and become the European Economic Community with its powerful euro. No one forced Americans to buy huge tanks called automobiles guzzling gas as if it were free, to buy houses they couldn’t afford, or to treat credit cards as if free money, paying only the interest on the cards each month.
Yes, there was deceit and mischief amongst the change masters at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, AIG, et al., but it always takes two to tangle. No one forced people into real estate contracts they couldn’t afford. Buyers and sellers were complicit in the deal. Hedge fund operatives were glad to create derivatives that no one understood to sell and resell, divide and sell again until tracing these initial contracts between seller and buyer was like looking for God in a whorehouse.
As for my guy at MacDonald’s, I shared his euphoria. It is high time that the face we look up to looks a little like our own face. I would not have had the life that I have enjoyed if my favorite uncle had not escaped first generation immigrant parents and their limited world. He climbed the academic ranks to be a department chairman of a Jesuit university (University of Detroit), and an entrepreneur and consultant as both a Ph.D. economist and Ph.D. psychologist.
Why do you think African Americans excel in sport? I once had an executive in Honeywell tell me, “It is because they have an extra muscle in their legs.” He believed this with his whole being as absurd as it was. There had to be an easy explanation, right? It couldn’t be otherwise. I countered, “Do you think it might have something to do with hard work meeting opportunity?”
“Opportunity?” he said, “You mean because they are natural jungle bunnies?”
I left it at that. He couldn’t conceive, so there was no point in suggesting it might have something to do with sport being opened to them, to know if they put their heart and soul into sport they might get lucky and succeed.
The standards of performance in sport are not arbitrary. They are well defined and are not color or culturally biased.
I’ve often wondered what I would be like if born brown or black given my temperament. I think I would be either an angry rebellious dude, or a criminal.
But if I saw my president was brown or black like me, I would feel the sky is the limit. I would walk about like this guy at McDonald’s feeling it was Christmas and my world had changed on a dime.
Cocky by nature, I don’t think that I would be less so if I were brown or black. I think I would exude cockiness, waiting for anyone to interrupt my pleasure. I’m white with a chip on my shoulder, why should it be any different if I were brown or black?
My guy at MacDonald’s was big like me, but gracious and good-natured, attributes I must confess are somewhat lacking in me. Being an SOB comes natural.
When I was a white hat in the navy, always reading books and speaking with a diction and vocabulary that often made other white hats crack, “He reads books and talks like a girl.” I would look at them with eyes waiting for someone to make the wrong move because I wanted to destroy someone with my hands. So, I can imagine what I would be like as if born brown or black.
I marvel at the temperament of our next president. It is clear he is well schooled in patience, intellect and discipline. I see him as an intellectual fencer parrying and reposing as required because the prize was worth it. He invested two grueling years to reach his goal, but admitted to an associate during a low point in the campaign, “Maybe I should have first become governor (Illinois).”
It is my hope that he now has the energy and commitment to spend the next four years with similar drive and dedication.
I quote Nietzsche and Smith at the outset of this missive. The quotes deal with power and self-interest, both indigenous to man. I don’t think your power or self-interests have been compromised. On the contrary, I think the lancing of your boil of anger has enhanced them.
Moreover, I think power and self-interest have been revealed to you in their full nakedness.
You have a great mind that is now at a critical stage in its development, and that mind needs to worry less about red, white and blue, and more about the new reality of white, brown and black.
I say this not intellectually, but literally in terms of my own experience. You see, my daughter, Jennifer, has had a brown boyfriend for the last several years, and no one in her young life has treated her with more respect, dignity and acceptance of her as she is. How do I know? Her whole being reflects happiness and joy that was seldom there before. She was always trying to live up to what her boyfriends wanted her to be, now she can be herself.
Move on, my friend, you are one of our leaders, and I’m just an old man no longer on the stage. You owe it to yourself and all of us to see your genius is used to pursue your best interests, which translates into ours as well.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 11, 2008
(Veterans Day in these United States of America)
“The strong are those who are more complete as human beings, who have learnt to channel the will to power into a creative force.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900), German philosopher and psychologist
“Intentionally serving one’s own interests one unintentionally serves the interests of society as a whole.”
Adam Smith (1723 – 1790), Scottish economist and philosopher
PREAMBLE
The recent election of Barak Obama to the American presidency to take office on January 20, 2008 has been contentious to say the least. It has generated levels of emotions from individuals, I suspect, who were not aware of harboring emotions of such construction.
The election represents an unprecedented event in American politics by elevating a black man to the highest office of the land. It was bound to generate massive conflict between “what was” and “what is, is.” Internet legends have painted Obama, the man, his mind, his race, and his family with a broad brush in the most compromising terms.
Is he a liberal? Well, his voting record certainly was as liberal as was that of Senator Ted Kennedy.
The labels "liberal" and "conservative" have become terms so ambivalent to be meaningless.
If Senator Kennedy had acted more sensibly a long time ago, few doubt he would not have been our president. Senator Kennedy, of course, is white.
On the night of July 19, 1969 with fog rolling in, senator Ted Kennedy while traveling with Mary Jo Kopechne, an office aid, ran off the Chapaquitic Bridge and the young lady drowned a week before her 29th birthday.
In the nearly forty years that have passed since that terrible night, the ghost of suspicion has haunted the Massachusetts senator. Meanwhile, he has become one of the most effective senators in American history. That is not my assessment but American historians of both liberal and conservative persuasion.
The response that is to follow was a response to my missive, “Two Champions in the Service of Others.” I should warn you in advance that it is as candid as it is visceral. It comes from a person I’ve known for nearly thirty years, a person I love like a son. He is one of the most gifted and authentic people I have had the pleasure of knowing.
All morning today I have pondered his response to my missive. Part of me wanted to go on working on my novel; another felt it too important to take a pass.
My friend takes a quote from my missive and then introduces me to a side of him I have known was there, but was never expressed before with such force. It represents a theme of fear bordering on despair for an uncertain future. I know that I cannot reassure him, or assuage his doubt as he contemplates the election.
These are troubling times no less because we Americans associate prestige and security with power and money. For the majority of Americans, who never experienced the Great Depression, these are unchartered waters.
We are a shallow society because we could afford to be shallow. We have gotten by looking at most matters that concern us with the profoundly of skin deep. It is refreshing to see an exception to this in honest prose. When we make contact with our devils that devour us, we discover our angels who liberate us.
My children are not and never have been readers. I sense that many of my generation are reluctant readers as well, and that is sad, especially as it relates to our American history and the presidency.
President Teddy Roosevelt liberalized Negro access to jobs and opportunity then president Woodrow Wilson reverse that liberalization.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt attacked the Great Depression with a number of programs, and is honored for taking us out of it. Actually, he never lifted us out of the economic downturn. WWII did that. However, FDR did institute Social Security and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to ensure the savings of Americans.
President John F. Kennedy, the Camelot president, got us into many fracases, including sending military trainers to Vietnam, while doing little to promote the Civil Rights Movement. JFK did initiate, however, the program that got us to the moon within the decade of his administration.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, much maligned, orchestrated a massive Civil Rights transformation. The Obama presidency is its fruition and LBJ's legacy. But he is best remembered for the debacle of the Vietnam War and his dissembling of it.
President Richard Nixon gave us Watergate, but he also opened the gates to China.
President George W. Bush stewarded the highest deficit in American history by any president, Democratic or Republican. He ran on a platform of compassionate conservatism, which failed to show in domestic or foreign policy, that is, with one overlooked exception, Africa. There he has proven compassionate with billions of dollars of aid toward medical relief and educational support, especially against the AIDS epidemic.
Good intentions seldom translate into expected or obvious outcomes in a state of accelerating tension or catastrophic demands, such as 9/11. When that occurs, ghosts unacknowledged are likely to surface. The Iraq War of 2003 at the expense of the Afghanistan War was less about oil or 9/11 than about getting even by Bush43 for the failure of Bush41 in the first Iraq War of 1991.
We are a people, a society, a community, and a culture that has never been introduced to itself. We have had the luxury of basking in self-ignorance for most of our history without debilitating consequences. Now, apologies for self-aggrandizement and self-indulgence no longer cut it. Consequences have consequences.
The penalty of delay can be put off only so long. The world is changing, and we have refused to change with it because we could or we believed we could. That is no longer the case. We are not the center of the world anymore than the Catholic Church once claimed the earth was the center of the universe. As Nietzsche says, “We are all too human,” and so it is with our presidents as it is with all of us.
It has been my experience in a long life that our presidents have reflected the mind, mood and manner of the American people at that point in time.
When I was consulting police organizations from New York City to Miami in the 1970s as an organization development (OD) psychologist, I read a quote once from author Joseph Wambaugh (a former Los Angeles police sergeant): “A community gets the police force it deserves.” I found that only too true. Paraphrasing, “American voters acquire the leadership they need when they are ready.”
A WRITER WRITES:
“The test now will be for those uncomfortable with the roll (and I mean roll, not role so it's not a misprint) of history to get on board and support the new president.”
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., from, “Two Champions in the Service of Others,” November 10, 2008
Guys like me don’t take offense we take action.
If your guy and his krewe are “rolling” where they say they are, I will aggressively resist him by all and whatever means possible.
Recall that close to half of us did NOT sign up for his program. To Wit, I’m meeting w/ my broker at noon today to liquidate my 401K’s. Friday is the first closing liquidating my real estate investments.
The battle isn’t over it’s just starting. Socialism and freedom are incompatible, and I for one, choose the latter, even if it means I end up living in a trailer.
There’s a long way to go before we determine where history is rolling. My fear: socialism leads to economic collapse leads to social disorder out of which comes an authoritarian. The Republic is gone. Freedom is gone. Sound familiar?
I’m all for charity, in fact I believe it’s crucial for a healthy soul. When the fruits of my labors do go to charities, I decide who and when – not Obama or the American electorate.
What I would give freely, I will destroy or give away before I let you take it. Anybody can be liberal with somebody else’s wallet – give me yours and I’ll demonstrate. Leaders go first. Let them donate their millions to the cause and maybe some of us Neanderthals will reconsider.
Believe it or not, I have a little inner Democrat residual from my upbringing (and I pay a price for it in business).
I would support their efforts if they went into the uncompetitive areas and addressed the root problems, but they don’t do that. They use public money to buy votes and breed Democrats. They ride discontent as a means to power, but the poor remain poor.
They’re the ‘friend of the little guy’ like a drug dealer is a friend to the junkie. Shame on the Republicans for being crooks; shame more on the Democrats for exploiting the poor and ignorant for their own aggrandizement.
Your guy in MacDonald’s is going to be pretty dejected when his life changes not one iota for Obama’s election.
It’s great America elected a black guy, but it’s going to be horrible if that black guy fails miserably or much worse, gets shot by some a.hole. Either could break the spirit of black people for fifty years.
Enjoy the flak troublemaker.
E
PS And just for the record, I don’t give a rat’s ass what he looks like, where his people came from, whether he’s Christian, Muslim or Heathen, or who he beds with as long as it’s not my daughter. Neither do I hate him or anyone else; it’s not an emotional issue. It’s a development in my environment to be dealt with like any other. Thus spake the selfish, racist hate-monger, clinging desperately to my guns and religion.
DR. FISHER RESPONDS
It is actually comforting to hear vehemence expressed so forthrightly. I would imagine many could identify with the fear and despair (of the future) expressed here.
So, you are not alone, but that does not make you right. Once a boil is lanced the pressure released, it signals relief as the healing process commences. I sense healing in your wrath.
It would be dishonest to say I don't find your words disturbing. I do and they are. I suspect many Americans who have seen their portfolios shrink, as have BB and I, are troubled. No question, we are in unknown territory and fear is palpable. It was not of Senator Obama's making, however, nor the president's, but the body of complicit Americans everywhere. We own it and now an African American senator wants to take charge of it. Why? It goes back to power, self-interest, and immortality. Few want to climb that mountain, but it is tantamount to an addiction to a type.
President-elect Barak Obama, as I have said elsewhere, reminds me of corpocracy and the pyramid climbers I have worked with and for in the corporation.
Like them, I suspect the president-elect saw the pyramid as a series of boxes to be checked off to move on, and he has done that starting with acquiring a quality education, becoming well read and articulate, a quick study, and an exploiter of power where he found it, being little concerned of its legitimacy or illegitimacy. It’s very Machiavellian, very American, and the embodiment of corpocracy, only now by a black man.
I’ve seen the type consistently rise to the top. It was true of JFK, and his rise, as it was in a more prosaic sense by my last boss with Honeywell Europe, Ltd.
I’m betting president-elect Obama will be different. I’ve read him, heard him speak, watched him behave under intense scrutiny and pressure, and I find him resilient. Profundity has penetrated his superficiality.
Am I right? We shall see. I have enjoyed a lifetime of successfully sizing up people, and not being surprised. Granted, I don’t have access to Obama that I have had to others, and must project my sense of him. But I’ve used the “Fisher Paradigm” on him, which includes (1) personality profile; (2) geographic profile; and (3) demographic profile; and I find him the man for the times.
What surprises me the most about your anger is your failure to acknowledge your anger as the driver in your discourse. Anger is a good emotion, powerful emotion, even an important emotion.
You claim not to be emotional. That gives you away. Your engineering mind has failed to introduce you to yourself beyond your filigree of algorithms. You express the intensity of your emotions, forcing me to read between the lines, to calibrate their impact on you.
We live in a social democracy. One day you will receive social security checks reliably every month, checks well beyond what you have put into the system if you live as long as I have lived. I don’t send them back. I cash and use them. I am a socialist. The FDIC ensures my savings accounts at no expense to me. The drugs I have to take now that I am old are from pharmaceutical research largely funded by the federal government. I could go on and on and write a document of several pages outlining all the social programs of the federal, state and local government to which I am a benefactor.
So much of what we call “free enterprise” is so subsidized by the federal government that it is ludicrous to throw darts at socialistic practices when every democratic republic on earth is largely if not ideologically socialistic in character.
As for the shrinking of 401K accounts, we collectively have all been active or complicit in seeing the economic bubble burst, another failure to introduce us to our lives and the reality of our experience.
My 401K account in October 1987, when I was working in Europe, lost 60 percent of its value when Wall Street crashed. When I got around to using it after retiring in 1990, all the loss was recovered and then some. I never touched it between October 1987 and July 1990. I have had an insane idea all my life that I could never be as poor as I was as a youth, and in my more than seven decades that has proven the wisdom of my insecurity.
China and India didn’t start in 2000 to roar into being; nor did Europe suddenly break its complacency over night and become the European Economic Community with its powerful euro. No one forced Americans to buy huge tanks called automobiles guzzling gas as if it were free, to buy houses they couldn’t afford, or to treat credit cards as if free money, paying only the interest on the cards each month.
Yes, there was deceit and mischief amongst the change masters at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, AIG, et al., but it always takes two to tangle. No one forced people into real estate contracts they couldn’t afford. Buyers and sellers were complicit in the deal. Hedge fund operatives were glad to create derivatives that no one understood to sell and resell, divide and sell again until tracing these initial contracts between seller and buyer was like looking for God in a whorehouse.
As for my guy at MacDonald’s, I shared his euphoria. It is high time that the face we look up to looks a little like our own face. I would not have had the life that I have enjoyed if my favorite uncle had not escaped first generation immigrant parents and their limited world. He climbed the academic ranks to be a department chairman of a Jesuit university (University of Detroit), and an entrepreneur and consultant as both a Ph.D. economist and Ph.D. psychologist.
Why do you think African Americans excel in sport? I once had an executive in Honeywell tell me, “It is because they have an extra muscle in their legs.” He believed this with his whole being as absurd as it was. There had to be an easy explanation, right? It couldn’t be otherwise. I countered, “Do you think it might have something to do with hard work meeting opportunity?”
“Opportunity?” he said, “You mean because they are natural jungle bunnies?”
I left it at that. He couldn’t conceive, so there was no point in suggesting it might have something to do with sport being opened to them, to know if they put their heart and soul into sport they might get lucky and succeed.
The standards of performance in sport are not arbitrary. They are well defined and are not color or culturally biased.
I’ve often wondered what I would be like if born brown or black given my temperament. I think I would be either an angry rebellious dude, or a criminal.
But if I saw my president was brown or black like me, I would feel the sky is the limit. I would walk about like this guy at McDonald’s feeling it was Christmas and my world had changed on a dime.
Cocky by nature, I don’t think that I would be less so if I were brown or black. I think I would exude cockiness, waiting for anyone to interrupt my pleasure. I’m white with a chip on my shoulder, why should it be any different if I were brown or black?
My guy at MacDonald’s was big like me, but gracious and good-natured, attributes I must confess are somewhat lacking in me. Being an SOB comes natural.
When I was a white hat in the navy, always reading books and speaking with a diction and vocabulary that often made other white hats crack, “He reads books and talks like a girl.” I would look at them with eyes waiting for someone to make the wrong move because I wanted to destroy someone with my hands. So, I can imagine what I would be like as if born brown or black.
I marvel at the temperament of our next president. It is clear he is well schooled in patience, intellect and discipline. I see him as an intellectual fencer parrying and reposing as required because the prize was worth it. He invested two grueling years to reach his goal, but admitted to an associate during a low point in the campaign, “Maybe I should have first become governor (Illinois).”
It is my hope that he now has the energy and commitment to spend the next four years with similar drive and dedication.
I quote Nietzsche and Smith at the outset of this missive. The quotes deal with power and self-interest, both indigenous to man. I don’t think your power or self-interests have been compromised. On the contrary, I think the lancing of your boil of anger has enhanced them.
Moreover, I think power and self-interest have been revealed to you in their full nakedness.
You have a great mind that is now at a critical stage in its development, and that mind needs to worry less about red, white and blue, and more about the new reality of white, brown and black.
I say this not intellectually, but literally in terms of my own experience. You see, my daughter, Jennifer, has had a brown boyfriend for the last several years, and no one in her young life has treated her with more respect, dignity and acceptance of her as she is. How do I know? Her whole being reflects happiness and joy that was seldom there before. She was always trying to live up to what her boyfriends wanted her to be, now she can be herself.
Move on, my friend, you are one of our leaders, and I’m just an old man no longer on the stage. You owe it to yourself and all of us to see your genius is used to pursue your best interests, which translates into ours as well.
Be always well,
Jim