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