NOVEMBER 4, 2008 -- GREAT ELECTION DAY -- AN EXCHANGE!

GREAT ELECTION DAY – AN EXCHANGE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 4, 2008

“In all science error precedes the truth, and it is better it should go first than last.”

Horace Walpole (1661 – 1724), English author

A PROFESSOR WRITES:

Jim

Thanks for the note.

I am teaching in Germany this spring. I start off our German MBA program each year.

If your friend were near Mannheim I would enjoy meeting him.

One note on your missive, if you recall, I lived and worked in Cairo for two years and learned much while there.

Islam is one of our newer religious movements so your dating of it for nearly two thousand years -- “a thousand awake and a thousand asleep” -- is off by about 800 hundred years.

Mohammad’s rise to influence was in the 8th century, and from that point on it has been a complex set of forces at work that few really understand. Their influence on the larger world has ebbed and flowed but if you examine the number of followers some are suggesting a resurgence of influence.

But again, think in terms of the many complex and not easy to understand forces at work that are primarily associated with only the last 1200 or so years.

Resurgence in a society few outside understand may mean something very differently. In there basic economic assumptions, there are significantly altered perspectives of what is right and wrong.

These differences are often far more critical to understand than even the different assumptions about gender roles.

I do much agree with your notion of intelligence might be a critical factor in our President but the whole idea that any modern society can build such a dependency on one single human being is our best evidence yet that as a species we really do not understand the role that social intelligence plays (my italics because I plan to address this in the reply).

This hero worship could well be called delusional except that as a projective technique it does keep us from really challenging most of our social and political assumptions.

In my short life, I must say I have almost never witnessed any significant act by a single leader unless the act was primarily destructive. An individual may destroy much but for any real leadership I have been saying for years we should now put the emphasis on the SHIP and not just the captain.

We need all of us working together and then eventually we will create new forms and models for the means to create the leaders we need.

My favorite leader model is in line with self-organizing systems. For years, I’ve hoped for a chance of self-management being respected for its potential. Both terms, self-organizing and self-management are barely understood by the organizations I work in or consult.

We are still a young species so there is hope. I assume the same hope exists for us today in that people, hopefully in record numbers of voters, will make a better choice than any one of us could have made alone.

No matter who is elected this SHIP needs a number of great leaders and what each of us do with our own lives presents to us the information of whether we again as a species have the chance to grow and flourish.

Perhaps our best days could be behind us. To some people the human race is either so immature or even perhaps so toxic that this planet does not deserve us. For me, I have always had hope we may be able to grow up a bit and selfishly I would like to think my own life is evidence of some level of maturity.

A nice dream anyway.... time well tell.

Ken


PS Keep writing the sparks you create have impact on many of us even when you have no idea how the great collective mind is being formed. Like in this election today, several million people will be making individual choices that will indicate to those of us curious about what kind of world we live in and what to do next.

The patriots among us will want to try and help our country move forward no matter what the results today are. I hope I am capable of doing that even if I have no idea why the people voted as they did.

If we can all work together then we have a chance, if not our future will not be good. So, to the patriots that keeps the hope alive to move forward this one-day means far less than for those that believe their citizenry responsibilities are measured in moments at the voting booth. Today, is mostly about information, tomorrow we go back to work. k

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Ken,

Good to hear from you. I was speaking metaphorically of the Arabian culture, which, of course, predates Muhammad. I am not used to people reading me much less reading me literally, but it is a nice feeling having someone such as you bring my error to my attention. I will endeavor to be more careful subsequently, and, of course, you are correct.

With regard to my friend, here is the information you might find useful:

Manfred Fiedler
Meisenweg 9
63484 Hanau
Tel: 06181/85 03 39
Fax: 06181/98 95 36
Email: g-m.fiedler@t-online.de

When I was director of human resources planning & development for all of Europe, some 13,000 employees in eight countries, Manfred was director of human resources for Germany out of Mannheim.

I left Europe and then Honeywell in 1990, while Manfred went on to be executive vice president of human resources, international operations, working out of Minneapolis, MN.

His two sons – MBA graduates from American universities -- are consultants, I believe, working mainly in the US and across the globe. The Manfred's have a daughter a couple years older than my youngest. My daughter Jennifer will be 34 later this week. Jessica took a Ph.D. in pharmacology here in the US, and is located on the West Coast.

BB and I have stayed with the Fiedlers in Hanau, which is near Frankfurt, as you may know. Gerda is Manfred's wife, and the two are simply a delightful couple, well read, well traveled, and spirited. Should you meet them, you will be delighted with them.

OTHER THINGS MENTIONED IN YOUR PIECE

In one sense, I agree with you, and until quite recently I totally agreed with you, that "one single human being” couldn’t be assigned the leadership to which we may elect him or her. That is, until I started reading about the shadowy deception of our "co-president, Dick Cheney" and the George “W” Bush years (2000 – 2008).

This period indicates the implicit danger assumed when THE SHADOW of an administration comes to man and manipulate those elected to its own devices, as many authors have concluded (the list of which will be provided at the end of this piece).

Dick Cheney has been a marvel, and always in the shadows so that when push came to shove he never got bruised.

From one expert observer I read:

"Cheney by nature is a high functionary and inside operative, ready to learn and eager to ferret out the background of people and events, both the things he is supposed to know and the things he is not."

He demonstrated that as far back as in the Ford Administration with aplomb, almost as if in the present context that fact is a forgotten aberration.

Over the past three decades, Cheney has crystallized his thinking about the advantages of recessive stance. Now, this is different from my passive aggression as it is quite active and powerful in its efficacy as I intend to relate here.

Cheney has the ability to get behind a charmer, such as Reagan, treat him as if a paper doll cut out, knowing that the person, Reagan or more recently George “W” Bush, are disinterested in the fundamentals of day-to-day governing, and actually are glad to hand it off to such a man, believing unwisely that he will protect them from taking any real flack.

Reagan took his naps and "W" spent hours in the gym to survive the day, while Cheney ran things and people. There are a number of books I could recommend on the subject in case you're interested.

What amazes me -- and I'm still surprised I can be amazed -- Cheney's reign at Halliburton saw its stock dive from $54 to $9 a share between August and December 2000, and it didn't touch him. Reminds me of Mike Bonsignore at Honeywell. It was the reason I wrote CORPORATE SIN that nobody read.

Turn OD inside out and upside down, and you have Cheney who was a connection maker, a facilitator, a speculative explorer of large innovations, and a stone face with brass balls that never showed his cards.

He gathered a cadre of folks around him of like-minded spirits who implicitly followed his WILL without having to have it stated in bold type.

There was Irving Kristol, Richard Perl, John Poindexter, Elliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby -- I could go on and on, people always in the news while THE SHADOW (Cheney) was far from sight.

An aside: I am part of a burgeoning "think tank," and know I must be cautious because the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is a clone of Cheney with bright, bright people who behave as pawns on his chessboard, perhaps without knowing it. We brainy types are often finessed on our own petards.

Item: AEI has been transformed through Cheney’s neocons’ intervention from an independent think tank into an institute for the promotion of laissez-faire economics, militarized foreign policy, and the dismantling of the welfare state. I must confess I once had the fantasy of working for AEI with the prospect and freedom to think. I know now that I would have been kicked out once I opened my mind to its inhabitants.

Please bear with me. It was Cheney who advocated as long ago as 1993 a prescription of "action against emerging threats before they are fully formed." He reechoed that sentiment in 2002 at West Point. “W” went along with it in 2003 for real in Iraq.

Cheney is the master architect managing and promulgating the rationale for (a) extreme interrogation; (b) drowning torture; (c) renditions to rogue nations with experts in such torture as Egypt: (d) the creation of a class of stateless persons-without-human rights (Guantanamo), and (e) tagging such prisoners with the explosive language of "enemy combatants."

Poor "W" has been a clone to THE SHADOW. It was Cheney who impressed "W" with the maxim that negotiations were a sign of weakness and a form of surrender.

You look at Cheney, this grandfatherly old man with the bad heart and white hair talking out of the side of his mouth in a television interview as if no one can hear him, and you realize that the danger in our society is not the people we elect, but the people the elected appoint and, alas, Congress confirms, or in the case of Chaney, piggyback on the president as vice president.

Cheney was originally appointed by "W" to ferret out possible candidates for his vice president. He bypassed the process and told "W" he was his best bet. It didn't stop there. Virtually every member of “W’s” cabinet was first vetted and recommended by Cheney and confirmed by "W." If that is not a little scary, consider this.

Cheney along with the so-called neocons saw themselves, as an alternative culture as they disregarded the boundaries of respectable American opinion and imposed their own will. According to the experts, Cheney’s province was all things military, also domestic and foreign policy, natural resources, energy policy, and when it came to nominations, he made the appointments, of course, with “W’s” approval.

Neocons take pride in defying intellectuals as do-nothings and going nowheres. Neocons think but don’t regard themselves as thinkers, again taking pride in being cut off from intellectual society for the most part, reading selectively and purposefully.

I was surprised to find Allan Bloom's CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND set up a new set of prejudices for neocons with hostility to individual liberty, and an almost shocking love affair with new technology. They appeared friendly to religion as a guide to morals, but more importantly as a powerful engine of state. In a word, neocons with Cheney’s leadership imposed a substitute culture of satisfying density, and it has wreaked havoc on this country for nearly a quarter century now.

What appalls me the most is that it comes out of "managerial intellectual judgment," something of which I have had some acquaintance, as do you.

I share this with you because of your comment -- "one person cannot lead," which I find misleading, especially when the person doing the damage is essentially a SHADOW.

Unfortunately, one person can create a substitute culture that can selectively and successfully plow down old values in a short time as Cheney & Co.have done with the approval of their unwitting stooge, "W."

About none of this has Cheney been called by a subpoena from Congress or an urgent demand from the press to answer questions regarding the extent and legality of his innovations or his operatives if even obliquely. Yes, there is Lewis Libby Affair, and his special prosecution, but I mean more manifestly.

It is as if people do not believe THE SHADOW bears close watching much less careful scrutiny. I'll quote an expert now that says what I've attempted to say in my missives and books:

"Why not? The reluctance shows a tremendous failure of nerve, from the point of view of democracy and public life. But there is logic to the sense of futility that inhibits so many citizens who have been turned into spectators. It comes from the dynamic of the co-presidency itself, to which the press has grown acclimatized."

I claim this is true of our whole society.

Henry Kissinger once said that, "You bring your capital with you" when you're in the hot seat negotiating or making decisions. Intellectual capital is what he is speaking about, and it is what I've been writing about for thirty years.

An expert writes of "W": "The fact that Bush's answers are so inadequate, from a defect of mental sharpness and retentiveness as well as dissimulation, kills the appetite for further questions."

The special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald put it best about the Libby Affair and all the concomitant innuendos that surrounded Cheney & Co.: “That cloud is something you just can’t pretend isn’t there.”

Ken, you are much more an optimist than I am. I hope you are right and I am not.

Be always well, and thank you once again for taking the time to enlighten me.

Jim

PS Some books of possible interest on the subject of Cheney et al. are: “The Dark Side” by Jane Mayer; “Angler” by Barton Gellman; “The Way of the World” by Ron Suskind; “Takeover” by Charles Savage; “What Happened” by Scott McClellan; “The Bush Tragedy” by Jacob Weisberg; “Cheney” by Stephen Hayes; and “The War Within” by Bob Woodward.
JRF