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