PSYCHOLOGY AND THE BUSINESS OF LEADING!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 29, 2008
“Emotion which does not lead to and flow out in right action is not only useless, but it weakens character, and becomes an excuse for neglect of effort.”
Tryon Edwards (1809 – 1891), American theologian
* * * * * *
In my long career, I have seldom seen leaders take into account the impact of the psychology of the situation on their decision making either individually or collectively.
Leaders, I have noted, base most of their decisions, on the short-term impact, or how it might play in the business or the market or the industry in which they compete. This psychology of neglect is as common in the family as it is with leaders in multi-national corporations. Leaders forget they are dealing with persons.
Alexander II, the last great tsar of Russia, was cut down while in his carriage by bomb throwers in front of a beautiful Russian Orthodox Church in St. Petersburg, which we visited when we were in Russia in 2007. In many ways, he was a kind emperor, but in many other ways he was not. He refused to allow Russia and its large peasant class to enter the Industrial Revolution other than subserviently, failing to understand the psychology of the times.
So often in my career, I have seen leaders take their workers for granted, not recognizing the changing nature of the psychology of work, and the changing nature of life itself. It is almost as if leaders are strangers to themselves, buying their own inflated regard, failing to see or understand their vulnerability, in fact, powerless beyond measure to recognize they are equally fragile and insubstantial as everyone else.
With such self-forgetting, leaders make decisions that impact the psychology of others in terms of dignity and self-respect, decisions that ultimately predict the collapse of their leadership.
No decision either small or large should be made without considering the psychological impact on the people it effects. People have their self-interest at heart. Through all the rhetoric, all the machinations of how tough times are, how we have to tighten our belts, how we have to work as a team, as a family, and all the other rot of such discourse, it always comes back to dignity and self-respect, fairness and consistency, and how I am, personally, being treated as an individual.
A company I was consulting was in deep trouble. It launched a vigorous campaign to improve quality and the delivery of its products. Forty managers and their direct supports worked seven days a week for the better part of two months to come up with a plan that turned the corner, while one-hundred and sixty workers were treated as no accounts. They weren’t interviewed, except by me, weren’t asked for their input, and treated as if they had no stake in the operation’s survival.
When the dust cleared, the product assurance manager was given a $10,000 bonus, and the other managers a letter of appreciation from the CEO, while the workers were provided with an announcement over the public address system that their jobs were secure.
The psychology of this abysmal situation could not have been worse on all levels. The company eventually failed. The workers, who were never included, never owned the problem or its correction. And although they saw their jobs disappear, it was an apparent price they were willing to pay for their bitterness of exclusion. As for the managers, many went forward like proper puppets too programmed to do otherwise, but a few left soon after the $10,000 bonus was awarded.
SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998) was written after seeing repeated evidence that a subconscious poison invades the spirit of workers when they are not treated fairly, consistently, and with dignity and respect. The moment an exception is made to protect a friend at the expense of someone else who is doing all the work is the moment this ugliness invades the human heart.
Every worker everywhere knows who is doing the work and who isn’t. Why don’t leaders know this, too?
My answer is that they are too busy covering their ass doing what they perceive as the least direct fall out. It is not a coincidence that the complainer, the operator, the devious one is more likely to keep his job than the worker when push comes to shove. The schemer as worker hides in seniority, others hide in having something on the boss, and still others play the flattering game for all it is worth. I have participated in redundancy exercises and have never seen departure from this formula.
The psychological fall out is manifested directly in the “six silent killers,” which are passive behaviors that are invisible but palpable in their impact causing more than $1 trillion in lost work every year while these same workers are on the job every day. No field of endeavor escapes this syndrome.
For the past four months, I have watched the collapse of the Tampa Bay Bucs, the National Football League team. Jeff Garcia is the quarterback who has been treated with less than dignity and respect, while showing real grit on the playing field. Imagine what he might have done if he had been treated more fairly and appreciated more thoroughly by his management.
Then there is the defensive genius of Monte Kiffin, who has chosen to leave the team in support of his son who is the new head coach for the University of Tennessee. His son has already been fired from one head-coaching university job, and now Monte is attempting to save him from another. Blood wins out as Monte has constantly turned down NFL jobs to be a head coach.
The psychological problem with the Buc’s collapse tracks precisely with Monte’s announcement of leaving the team. The incredulous would say, “No way! These are professionals!”
True, they are professionals, but a battered, beaten up team of mounting injuries to many veterans, players at an age when they should have retired by now. Along with all their physical pain, they didn’t need a psychological shock to their system much as it might be anticipated, leastwise at this time.
Defense in football is warfare. I know I played the sport. The relationship between a defensive coach and players is a close one, a very close one. Professional or not, they are having difficulty dealing with psychological abandonment, although not articulated or admitted, which this could clearly be felt to be.
You say these are men. Yes, they are, but they are also fragile, vulnerable, and frail men when it comes to the psychology that holds them intact, the same psychology with which we are all familiar.
For three months, the Monte Kiffin’s defense allowed one rushing touchdown with most games won on defense for a 9 – 3 record. In December 2008, the defense collapsed and the team lost the last four games of the season, all because the defense did not show up. In fact, the defense allowed 7 rushing touchdowns, 30 or more points and nearly 200 yards rushing per game during the month, when the first three months of the season they had held most teams to under 100 yards rushing per game.
Everyone says Monte’s announcement was a non-factor. The psychology suggests otherwise. You can build muscle on muscle and yet the human heart grows not at all. It is an emotional vessel of a finite capacity, and needs attention, needs respect, and needs understanding, something that I have not often seen in the human arena of work by its leadership.
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.
Monday, December 29, 2008
HAVE WE BECOME A MADOFF NATION?
HAVE WE BECOME A MADOFF NATION?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 22, 2008
“The corruptions of the country are closely allied to those of the town, with no difference but what is made by another mode of thought and living.”
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), Irish satirist, Dean of St. Patrick’s, author of “Gulliver’s Travels”
“In recent years the finance sector accounted for 8 percent of America’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product), up from less than 5 percent a generation earlier. If that extra 3 percent was money for nothing – as it probably was – we’re talking about $400 billion a year in waste, fraud and abuse.”
Paul Krugman, 2008 Nobel Laureate in Economic, The New York Times
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A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD! BERNARD MADOFF – ARE WE FOREVER DOOMED TO MORE OF THE SAME?
Bernard Madoff is one of those nondescript people you may bump into while going to high school. You could lose him going to your student locker between classes, have no idea what happened to him, but rumor have it he married well, and then one day you see him all over television with baseball cap down over his eyes, coat collar of his jacket turned up, smirk on his face, hands stuffed in his pockets, as if not a care in the world.
This unremarkable character is alleged to have swindled his father-in-law’s charity out of $175 million and the family fortune of another $400 million, which is a drop in the bucket to the alleged $55 billion he has taken from high stakes investors, banks, philanthropies and other institutions across the globe. Most people, who have suffered these huge losses, have no idea who Bernard Madoff is much less what he looks like. Thanks to his fall from grace and television now they know.
The immediate aftermath was the suicide of Rene-Thierry, 65, who was found dead at his desk in the New York office of Access International Advisors, having cut his wrists with a box cutter. He was responsible for the loss of $1.4 billion of his clients’ money, and tens of millions of dollars of his own fortune, being virtually ruined financially along with his clients. When life is so synthetic that material wealth is the primary identifier, this action should be expected.
We have lost our moral compass and our way. We no longer feel real to ourselves, but chase synthetic arbiters as dollars or euros to seed our folly.
Look Back! We have been there before, in fact, over and over again. We are stuck in absurdity. While applauding our brilliance, we fail to see our weakness. We complain of shock, surprise, disgust, but vulnerability is native to our one-dimensional society.
Herbert Marcuse argues in “One Dimensional Society” (1964) that Western societies since WWII have moved to new forms of control in thought and education, resulting in the closing of the political universe so that opposing parties are nearly identical. He saw psychiatry in its quest to defeat unhappy consciousness desublimating depression with happy pill addictions.
He saw the ruse of closing off dialectical debate by attacking the dissenters rather than the subject at issue. One-dimensional attacks used negative thinking to defeat the logic of protest. Marcuse anticipated technological rationality and its logic of domination. This logic spawned patent optimism in face of all evidence to the contrary, crystallizing this in the one-dimensional philosophy: “technology will save us from all our sins!”
WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990) observed:
“America’s one sided one-dimensional progress has reached the alarming stage. This situation is so contradictory that it borders on insanity. We can control a soft landing of a spacecraft on distant planets, but we cannot control the polluting fumes emanating from our automobiles and factories. We propose utopian communities in gigantic space colonies, but cannot manage crime in our cities. The business community salutes the terrific growth of the pet food and cosmetic industries as signs of progress, but we cannot afford to feed the homeless or provide health care for the needy. We are among the best educated of Western nations in terms of per capita high school and college graduates – with arguably the best university system in the West – but few Americans read books, are multilingual, or are familiar with the culture or geography of other nations, much less their own. In fact, some see the American educational system as ‘killing the spirit’ of the American student to learn.”
I have been tracking this one-dimensional progress most of my life. Some 35 years ago, I wrote an essay in my journal about our vulnerability. At the time, we were experiencing the high jinx of corporate dalliance with double-digit unemployment and double-digit inflation. Corporate CEOs cackle it was not their fault, while professors and self-appointed gurus in all forms of media painted the air blue in psychobabble about the “Age of Anxiety,” “Crisis in Confidence,” “Lack of Leadership,” as if these were surprised discoveries. Listen up! We have been stuck since WWII.
One day in 2006, I happened again on this journal and decided to publish. My God, I said to myself, why can’t we see we are stuck? The book was a wake up call knowing waking up is not on our agenda.
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007) argued:
“It is apparent in the early days of the twenty-first century that America is not unlike the 1970s when young people were forced to participate in an unpopular war; when political upheaval was in the air; when corrupt politicians who lied and deceived the electorate reached a crescendo with Watergate; when drugs were ruining lives; when morality took a holiday; when new forms of bigotry and hatred were hatching; when the automotive industry was in sharp decline, while foreign automakers were eating our lunch; when an energy crisis rocked the land with OPEC’s oil embargo; when a paranoid president hunkered down and became a law unto himself; when Congress stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn’t face them, and left the future up for grabs.”
Why do we fail to learn from our mistakes? Why do we insist in repeating them? Why do we wear masks of confidence in the midst of chaos and collapse? Why are we stuck in history? The answer is in the words of Spanish philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it:“
THE SUCKING SOUND OF CORRUPTION
Remember the “Keating Five” of the Savings & Loan Scandal of the 1980s? They were alleged to be coconspirators in the Keating scandal. Charles H. Keating, Jr., a big time campaign contributor to members of Congress, took investors and depositors of the S&L’s for billions, people who felt their money was safe in a system they trusted.
Who were the “Keating Five”? Our best and brightest. I say this because we elected them to the highest public offices, and if they weren’t, shame on us!
You see the “Keating Five” were members of Congress and the United States Senate. There was Senator John McCain, the recently defeated Republican presidential candidate, and Senator John Glenn, the great American astronaut. Both men despite the scandal were reelected to the Senate. Not so the other Congressmen: Alan Cranston (D-CA), Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ) and Donald Riegle (D-MI).
Keating was chairman of the Lincoln Savings & Loan Association. He went to prison for his deeds. What happened?
No less than 747 S&L’s went belly up. The ultimate cost of the crisis was $160.1 billion, about $124.6 billion of which was directly paid for by the U.S. taxpayers. The 1990 – 1991 economic recession followed. Between 1986 and 1991, the number of new homes constructed per year dropped from 1.8 million to 1 million, the lowest rate since World War II. Tens of thousands lost their jobs, many thousands their homes, and the manufacturing industry, which was reeling from competition from Japan and South East Asia, and emerging competition from Europe, was never to recover.
All the wrenching of hands, all the pointing of fingers, all the Congressional hearings, all the calls for greater regulation and oversight, all the new laws on the books, and all of the media books produced by experts and critics detailing the S&L scandal and demanding change could now be reissued from the old tag line of “S&L Scandal” to the new tag line “Bernard Madoff Scandal,” and you wouldn’t even have to edit the content. Along with the same duplication and replication of events, accusations and declarations of resolve to correct would be the same tired formulas that nobody plans to observe much less implement. The more things change the more they remain stuck.
But why?
CORPORATE SOCIETY & THE DEVILS IS IN THE DETAILS
Management guru Peter Drucker is acclaimed as “The Man Who Invented The Corporate Society,” which, incidentally, is the title of John J. Tarrant’s 1976 biography of the Austrian-American. It is a catchy title and powerful identity, but, unfortunately more than one hundred years off the mark. Not surprisingly, The Wall Street Journal and Wall Street took the Drucker mantra as gospel into the embodiment of “corpocracy.” This is explained in SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998):
“Corporate management as corpocracy: (1) treats employees as numbers not persons; (2) supports company politics at the expense of productivity; (3) uses stealth as a measure of communication; (4) finds data collection its principle product; (5) disguises its confusion with endless meetings; (6) allows markets to drift away for its fanatical internal focus; (7) hides indecision in excessive planning; (8) fears individual initiative as you never know where it might lead; (9) lives in a box walled off from the reality of work; (10) exudes overt praise for innovation while harboring covert hostility to it.”
Corporate society is a product of the Civil War, not of Peter Drucker. The Civil War allowed the Industrial Revolution to hit its full stride, explode on all its cylinders, and drive Western society out of a 600-year stalemate as essentially an agricultural and trade culture into modernity. At what price?
From the beginning of our 12,000-year history, a “cut and control” policy has prevailed. Each age sacrificed “what was” for something new, something that was desired but at the expense of something that was lost never to be regained.
This was true of the nomadic tribes of hunters and gatherers to the establishment of farms and households where property became important, then on to the age of the arts, craftsmanship and trade to the Industrial Revolution and modernity. Progress has been a double-edged blade throughout human culture. In studying this, I wrote “Near Journey’s End? Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-Indulgent Man? (2004, unpublished). My thesis was that progress has been our most important product, but with little appreciation at what price to our small planet and ourselves.
The Civil War has its industrial footprints all over it in weapons and armaments, uniforms and supplies, transportation and logistical support. Warfare was now planned, organized, coordinated, communicated, controlled, managed, and dispatched with mechanistic efficiency.
No longer was approximation good enough. Weapons and training required a precision not previously felt necessary. Virtually everything from paperwork to armaments had to meet specifications, standardization, and measurable stipulations as to efficiency, effectiveness, relevance and performance. Canons grew more sophisticated, the repeating rifle was invented, as was the submarine, and railroads became a weapon of critical import.
Sacrificed to this new high church of standardization were individuality, idiosyncrasy, independence and singular creativity that had been endemic to the American character.
Think back! Since the Civil War (1861 – 1865), American society has moved from primarily agrarian to essentially industrial to now mainly service. Complex manufacturing moved work from small guilds of individuals working together to large groups working in factories. Small towns and villages dried up with a mass exodus to new cities penciling the landscape where the jobs were.
The nuclear family of paternal dominance, which was centered on the community church was first fragmented and then destroyed. Pastoral identity where land and nature gave people a sense of place and space was gone forever. From open space where experience was direct and identity self-evident came group identity, group norms, and then identity by numbers. The close connection between doing and being was slipping away replaced by alienation from self, from work and finally from life, as it had been known. As Marcuse argues, this process has neither been acknowledge nor resolved but explained away by an ever-growing army of explainers.
Craftsmanship gave way to machines with standardized specifications, which ensured every product produced would be precisely the same. People became a product through social engineering to be classified, categorized and controlled. People were tunneled, pummeled and channeled into a predictable mass culture through compulsory public education, a rhetorical press, and an obliging clerical hierarchy. There was no room in this scheme of things for the idiosyncratic. It was important to fit in order to belong, to be like everyone else, to think, behave, believe and value what the corporate mantra claimed important.
Paradoxically, one group escaped this conforming the longest in America, and that was the African American community. During the Great Depression more than 80 percent of African Americans were in two parent families. The African American community church was center to their lives. Crime was uncommon while community support of each other was the norm.
The Civil Rights Movement was successful in desegregating schools, in passing the voting rights act, and equal opportunity under the law, thus improving upward mobility, but at what price? African Americans were last to embrace corpocracy, and now they share the same corporate identity and angst.
From birth to death, we measure our significance on what we have as a measure of what we are. It is so ingrained in our consciousness we don’t question it. We neither question the absurdity of political polls and best selling lists, and now thousands of websites that instruct us in how to live our lives, nor do we question the morbid absurdity of celebrity worship. Think of it. Celebrities are people we don’t know, will never meet, and have no idea who they are. Politicians, CEOs, and leaders everywhere are measuring their worth in terms of their celebrity pollster appeal. We have become an empty suit society.
We are also a nation of strangers who takes the word of an expert to our own experience. We have lost something since the Civil War.
Abraham Lincoln was self-taught with no formal education, a captain in the militia during the Black Hawk War, where he never saw action. In contrast, the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was a graduate of West Point, a decorated regiment commander in the Mexican War, and Secretary of War in President Franklin Pierce’s administration (1853 – 1857). Davis was a groomed corporate type. Lincoln was not.
Lincoln, however, read and absorbed works on military history and strategy so that historian T. Harry Williams concluded: “Lincoln stands out as a great war president, probably the greatest in our history, and a great natural strategist, a better one than any of his generals.” Lincoln was an outsider; Davis an insider.
Today, we are obsessed with being insiders. You aren’t considered intelligent unless you have a high “I.Q”; not ready for college without a superior SAT score, or graduate school without the required GRE levels.
So what do students do to boost their scores? They take courses that focus on the test, not on the learning they have acquired. Indeed, elementary and secondary education today is geared to a test score, not to learning, per se. Learning is not relevant! Blame the government that insists on classifying schools in terms of standardized test scores to determine allocation of Federal Funds. Psychometrics is a product of corpocracy.
Fifty years after the Civil War, corporate society became so embedded in the American culture that no one thereafter could remember the difference.
In the “Electronic Age,” this has grown from the sublime to the ridiculous. Even president-elect Barak Obama will not be without his BlackBerry. Nerds across America see this as good. I see it as scary. Everything is being reduced to an electronic grid.
Notice that the Secretary of Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve came up with a $700 billion bailout of the subprime real estate meltdown with no idea why it was $700 billion instead of $200 billion, or a $1 trillion. It was a number picked out of a rabbit’s hat with sophisticated algorithms of justification, reflecting the corporate sense of being trapped. Marcuse anticipated this when he said a one-dimensional society is locked in to its technological rationality with no escape. Notice, too, that those receiving billions of this bailout have not behaved as expected.
This is not all that surprising. Corporate society expects people to act like inanimate objects to be manipulated. Having killed the spirit of individuals, corpocracy has made people into empty constructs. This fits nicely into electronic algorithms, but doesn’t set too well with man’s primordial instinct to survive. As T. S. Eliot puts it:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw, Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
And elsewhere:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
We see this shadow in television comedy. We don’t want to be reminded of the shabby equipment of the neglected self. Instead, we prefer to retreat into sexual innuendo which is not funny, but entertains a blunted mindset that fails to see the ridiculous in self- ridicule. If we do not respect ourselves, who should; if we don’t display dignity, who should we blame?
Television drama is not of human conflict but a menu of mechanistic violence for an audience that has forgotten how to feel. The corporate mind has to be shocked to attention with the display of body parts, guts and gore in heinous crime. Men with the smirk of knowing and the women with uplifting bras to give them cleavage of authenticity solve these crimes with robotic precision. No one seems to wonder about this. Hard-boiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler had more heart
Celebrity corrals the juvenile mind of all ages into obedience with the likes of “American Idol.” Here young people surrender the coin of dignity to corporate embarrassment. For shame, they mount a dream of passion, which might better be spent learning how to read a book and master Euclidean geometry to a more satisfying and predictable end. They seek celebrity as if corporate adoration could supplant self-approval.
There is no heart in corpocracy. So, it substitutes fame, fortune and promotion. Corporations rise, and fall, writing off their demise as a matter of business as other corporate jackals pick up the pieces to realize a return on the carcass. Nary a thought is paid to the tens of thousands of wrecked lives due to corporate indifference. Corporate speak, “We had no choice.”
For the longest time, I’ve thought the problem was a matter of leadership, and it is, but it is impossible to produce leaders out of corpocracy. It is the antithesis of leadership.
WHY CORPORATE SOCIETY CANNOT LEAD
Corpocracy produced Jefferson Davis but not Abraham Lincoln. Davis had his eye on the prize of saving his southern lifestyle (instrumental value); Lincoln had his eye on the political objective of saving the union (terminal value). Lincoln’s objective was always political, never military, per se.
The antebellum culture of the prairie produced Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln and never anyone close to them since. Without leadership, we have followed not led technological change.
After the Civil War, America had no room for individuality. The Republic had moved progressively away from individuality to systemic relevance with increasing regimentation, integration and control.
In last forty years, television has gone from Beta to VHS to DVD to HDTV, and now in February 2009 all television programming will be digital. Explosive change has become a norm, but at what expense? I claim it has left the individual behind. Newspapers and magazines, and even books are disappearing as our world revolves around an impersonal grid of bouncing electrons across a flat screen while GPS tracking devices capture our every move. George Orwell anticipated this in “1984,” seeing us being constantly watched by such devices so that privacy once enjoyed was sinking away like a fading star.
Corpocracy is not about people. It is about numbers, always numbers. Its indicators are numbers; its planning are numbers; its long and short term decisions are numbers; its calibrated priorities are numbers. Is it any wonder that corporate accountancy should be flawed; that scandals should be associated with a society that values numbers more than it values people? We have become Eliot’s “hollow men”:
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear;
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star
And elsewhere:
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to Dust.
The Civil War created the momentum, which found home schooling on the farm moving inevitably to compulsory education in the schoolhouse. Compulsory education was geared to a controlled classroom with a fixed curriculum designed to serve corporate society’s needs. This extended to uniform dress, manners, mores, and morals conducive to conforming behavior. Students were channeled into narrow roles consistent with the demands of skilled and unskilled labor. Whereas farm hands and farm owners centered on the farm, now work centered on the corporate workplace and its owners who more than likely owned workers’ dwellings as well as the company store.
THE FORGOTTEN AMERICAN
Americans have had a history of being energetic, positive, optimistic, creative, independent, individualistic and self-determining. Much of this has been lost or turned into catchy slogans and synthetic models, leaving the genuine article behind.
Think back! In the early to late nineteenth century, America produced artists, artisans, philosophers, poets, dramatists and authentic heroes.
James Fenimore Cooper wrote “The Spy” (1821) and “The Last of the Mohicans” (1826); Herman Melville wrote the greatest American novel, “Moby Dick” (1851); Walt Whitman, wrote America’s greatest poem, “Leaves of Grass” (1855); Stephen Crane, wrote America’s first great war novel, “The Red Badge of Courage” (1895); Henry David Thoreau, showed America’s independent spirit moving to the Walden woods of Concord, and wrote “Walden” (1854); Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote “The Scarlet Letter” (1850), Ralph Waldo Emerson, arguably America’s greatest philosopher, wrote a series of essays that captured the American conscience (1841 – 1844), as well as being the leader of Transcendentalism, an intuitional religious movement; Edgar Allan Poe, wrote The Raven” (1845).
These mainly forgotten Americans had no choice but to grow from the inside out. Walt Whitman went to school until he was eleven and then did odd jobs most of his life inventing the prosody of language that came to be his poetry. Herman Melville went to sea as his Yale. Edgar Allan Poe’s brief stormy life included a short stint at college and in the military. He became the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living at the craft. Although dying at the age of 40, he managed to perfect the American short story, invent the mystery novel, and write lyrical poetry.
Henry James gave us “The American” (1877) and “The European” (1878) revealing his ambivalent allegiance. William James, Henry’s older brother, turned away from his brother’s European pique to immerse himself in Americana. He produced America’s own psychology (“The Principles of Psychology,” 1890), an American take on religion (“The Varieties of Religious Experience,” 1902) and America’s own philosophy (“Pragmatism,” 1907).
These Americans, hardly corporate types, have been much copied but seldom surpassed.
It wasn’t only the United States, but Europe was in a creative verve before corporate society took hold, a vitality that corporate society would exploit to its advantage in the twentieth century capitalizing on the inventions of the nineteenth century with technological dominance. To wit:
English chemist Humphry Davy invents the first electric light – the first arc lamp (1809) that American Thomas Edison makes practical with the carbon-filament light bulb (1879). Edison also invents the phonograph and motion picture (1877), which Eadweard Muybridge tops with the first motion picture machine (1877). Edison also discovers thermionic emission (1883), the basis of the electronic valve.
W. A. Burt, an American, invents the typewriter (1829), which Christopher Scholes makes practical with his invention (1867). Frenchmen, Barthelemy Thimonnier invents a sewing machine (1830), improved by the invention of American Elias Howe (1845), and made commercial with Isaac Singer’s sewing machine (1851). Cyrus McCormick, an American, invents the first commercially successful reaper (1831).
Englishman Michael Faraday invents an electric dynamo (1831. Henry Talbot invents photography (1834); Samuel Morse invents Morse code (1838). American Charles Goodyear invents rubber vulcanization (1839). Samuel Slocum patents the stapler (1841).
Dr. William Morton, an American, is the first to use anesthesia for tooth extraction (1846). Walter Hunt invents the safety pin (1849); Joel Houghton receives a patent for a dishwasher (1849). John Tyndall demonstrates the principles of fiber optics (1854), which 150 years later will change the world of communication.
Louis Pasteur invents pasteurization (1856). Hamilton Smith patents the rotary washing machine (1858). Jean Lenoir invents an internal combustion engine (1858). Alfred Nobel invents dynamite (1866).
Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone (1876). Nicolaus August Otto invents first practical four-stroke internal combustion engine (1876). Rudolf Diesel invents the diesel-fueled internal combustion engine (1892). James Dewar invents the Dear vacuum flask. W. L. Judson invents the zipper (1893); Lumiere Brothers invent the portable motion-picture camera.
Significant of a majority of these inventions is that they were by non-scientists, non-academics and in relative isolation with little or no access to others working on the same things, thus the replication.
Moreover, it was Thomas Edison, among others, in the late nineteenth century that took up the corporate idea of a place (Menlo Park) with several people working on inventions for which he would take full credit for more than a thousand patents. This was true of Nikola Tesla, the Croatian electrical engineer, who immigrated to America and worked for Edison at Menlo Park (see “Tesla: Man Out of Time” by Margaret Cheney). Tesla was responsible for scores of patents including alternating current (A/C), which Edison attempted to first take credit for, and when he couldn’t, attempted to sabotage.
It is no accident that one of the first things you sign over when you become an employee of Corporate America is anything you might create, invent or improve upon while so employed.
THE LOST GARDEN OF INDIVIDUALITY
We Americans are nostalgic, and when we are lost, as we are now, there is an incessant need to go back to our roots, to the garden of our beliefs, myths and invented history. We no longer embrace reality and struggle. We choose to deny them.
When corpocracy was in its infancy, a phenomenon such as American born British poet, T. S. Eliot, had the audacity to create, “The Waste Land” (1922), which captured the future in crystallized prosody. It is difficult to imagine such originality and daring today.
Instead, corruption is on our plate. It is a recipe for self-destruction. It spoils achievement with its fraudulent premise. We don’t like to see ourselves as we are, but as we would like to be seen. We chase the buck; we no longer chase the dream. For the past quarter century, the best and brightest have opted for financial engineering to electrical, chemical, and mechanical engineering, earning MBA’s to develop financial instruments to make money out of money, but produce nothing real, nothing substantial, nothing that could justify their careers. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman puts a $400 billion price tag on this annual “waste, fraud and abuse.” The future has caught up with us, and it is not a pretty sight. We have lost our brassy boldness to self-conscious self-pity.
It is no accident that the presidency of Andrew Jackson and the “Age of Jackson” is producing a spate of books, films, articles, doctorate studies, profiles, monographs and interviews of people producing this avalanche of materials. Why, you ask, is Jackson so important now?
Jackson embodies the America left behind. He is not the plastic man in the empty suit that Garry Wills writes about in “John Wayne’s America” (1997) with the subtitle “Politics of Celebrity.” Wayne didn’t opt to fight for his country in WWII, he instead decided to play heroes on the screen while men his age sweated and died for real in that war. He became the personification of corporate man out for himself but with a swagger and a drawl. Garry Wills writes:
“He (John Wayne) embodies the American myth. The archetypal American is a displaced person – arrived from a rejected past, breaking into a glorious future, on the move, fearless himself, feared by others, a killer for cleansing the world of things that ‘need killing,’ loving but not bound down by love, rootless but carrying the center in himself, a gyroscopic direction-setter, a traveling norm.”
Reading this you can see how it reflects the one-dimensional American character.
Now, Jackson was a different sort. He rose out of the wild, fought bravely as a boy of fourteen in the American Revolution, seeing his brother murdered, seething with revenge all his life against the British, and getting his satisfaction at the “Battle of New Orleans.’
Thomas Jefferson found Jackson bizarre, uncouth, unschooled, and a danger to American society. Jackson never attended regular school, was a frontiersman and climbed the latter of success by pure grip, guts, gumption and grizzle. He never read books, and prided himself in reading people and events. He was the real deal, not a one-dimensional man like John Wayne. Jackson was the quintessential man-of-action, and decisive to a fault.
To this day, moving into 2009, the eastern United States remains a different country than Jackson’s hinterland, where he put his indelible mark. The east still looks to Europe for its grandness, society, its manners and culture, which is quite different to countrified Jacksonians. The Washington, DC beltway is a surreal cocoon of politicians and lobbyists living in a satellite world that has little in common with twenty-first Jackson country.
There was corruption in Jackson’s day. Indeed, he was so direct about his favoritism that his administration was tagged the “spoils system.” On his first inauguration as president – he had actually won the office four years before but was denied the presidency – he often went over Congress to rally the people. President Barak Obama should keep this in mind.
Dr. Fisher, is this another one of your polemics? I don’t think so. New York Times columnist and popular author Thomas Friedman shows similar concern as 2008 winds down. He writes:
“Our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors as a result of our national drift. That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need to reboot. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis -- we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely. It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing-infrastructure-without building white elephants. . If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us. . . Obama needs to lead us on a journey to rediscover, rebuild and reinvent our own backyard.”
To do that, we will have to supplant our dependence on a corporate mentality that is the negative of all these positives. We need to return to the restless energy and the common drive of individualism of the past. We need to recast the nation in substantive work
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 22, 2008
“The corruptions of the country are closely allied to those of the town, with no difference but what is made by another mode of thought and living.”
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), Irish satirist, Dean of St. Patrick’s, author of “Gulliver’s Travels”
“In recent years the finance sector accounted for 8 percent of America’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product), up from less than 5 percent a generation earlier. If that extra 3 percent was money for nothing – as it probably was – we’re talking about $400 billion a year in waste, fraud and abuse.”
Paul Krugman, 2008 Nobel Laureate in Economic, The New York Times
* * * * *
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD! BERNARD MADOFF – ARE WE FOREVER DOOMED TO MORE OF THE SAME?
Bernard Madoff is one of those nondescript people you may bump into while going to high school. You could lose him going to your student locker between classes, have no idea what happened to him, but rumor have it he married well, and then one day you see him all over television with baseball cap down over his eyes, coat collar of his jacket turned up, smirk on his face, hands stuffed in his pockets, as if not a care in the world.
This unremarkable character is alleged to have swindled his father-in-law’s charity out of $175 million and the family fortune of another $400 million, which is a drop in the bucket to the alleged $55 billion he has taken from high stakes investors, banks, philanthropies and other institutions across the globe. Most people, who have suffered these huge losses, have no idea who Bernard Madoff is much less what he looks like. Thanks to his fall from grace and television now they know.
The immediate aftermath was the suicide of Rene-Thierry, 65, who was found dead at his desk in the New York office of Access International Advisors, having cut his wrists with a box cutter. He was responsible for the loss of $1.4 billion of his clients’ money, and tens of millions of dollars of his own fortune, being virtually ruined financially along with his clients. When life is so synthetic that material wealth is the primary identifier, this action should be expected.
We have lost our moral compass and our way. We no longer feel real to ourselves, but chase synthetic arbiters as dollars or euros to seed our folly.
Look Back! We have been there before, in fact, over and over again. We are stuck in absurdity. While applauding our brilliance, we fail to see our weakness. We complain of shock, surprise, disgust, but vulnerability is native to our one-dimensional society.
Herbert Marcuse argues in “One Dimensional Society” (1964) that Western societies since WWII have moved to new forms of control in thought and education, resulting in the closing of the political universe so that opposing parties are nearly identical. He saw psychiatry in its quest to defeat unhappy consciousness desublimating depression with happy pill addictions.
He saw the ruse of closing off dialectical debate by attacking the dissenters rather than the subject at issue. One-dimensional attacks used negative thinking to defeat the logic of protest. Marcuse anticipated technological rationality and its logic of domination. This logic spawned patent optimism in face of all evidence to the contrary, crystallizing this in the one-dimensional philosophy: “technology will save us from all our sins!”
WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990) observed:
“America’s one sided one-dimensional progress has reached the alarming stage. This situation is so contradictory that it borders on insanity. We can control a soft landing of a spacecraft on distant planets, but we cannot control the polluting fumes emanating from our automobiles and factories. We propose utopian communities in gigantic space colonies, but cannot manage crime in our cities. The business community salutes the terrific growth of the pet food and cosmetic industries as signs of progress, but we cannot afford to feed the homeless or provide health care for the needy. We are among the best educated of Western nations in terms of per capita high school and college graduates – with arguably the best university system in the West – but few Americans read books, are multilingual, or are familiar with the culture or geography of other nations, much less their own. In fact, some see the American educational system as ‘killing the spirit’ of the American student to learn.”
I have been tracking this one-dimensional progress most of my life. Some 35 years ago, I wrote an essay in my journal about our vulnerability. At the time, we were experiencing the high jinx of corporate dalliance with double-digit unemployment and double-digit inflation. Corporate CEOs cackle it was not their fault, while professors and self-appointed gurus in all forms of media painted the air blue in psychobabble about the “Age of Anxiety,” “Crisis in Confidence,” “Lack of Leadership,” as if these were surprised discoveries. Listen up! We have been stuck since WWII.
One day in 2006, I happened again on this journal and decided to publish. My God, I said to myself, why can’t we see we are stuck? The book was a wake up call knowing waking up is not on our agenda.
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007) argued:
“It is apparent in the early days of the twenty-first century that America is not unlike the 1970s when young people were forced to participate in an unpopular war; when political upheaval was in the air; when corrupt politicians who lied and deceived the electorate reached a crescendo with Watergate; when drugs were ruining lives; when morality took a holiday; when new forms of bigotry and hatred were hatching; when the automotive industry was in sharp decline, while foreign automakers were eating our lunch; when an energy crisis rocked the land with OPEC’s oil embargo; when a paranoid president hunkered down and became a law unto himself; when Congress stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn’t face them, and left the future up for grabs.”
Why do we fail to learn from our mistakes? Why do we insist in repeating them? Why do we wear masks of confidence in the midst of chaos and collapse? Why are we stuck in history? The answer is in the words of Spanish philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it:“
THE SUCKING SOUND OF CORRUPTION
Remember the “Keating Five” of the Savings & Loan Scandal of the 1980s? They were alleged to be coconspirators in the Keating scandal. Charles H. Keating, Jr., a big time campaign contributor to members of Congress, took investors and depositors of the S&L’s for billions, people who felt their money was safe in a system they trusted.
Who were the “Keating Five”? Our best and brightest. I say this because we elected them to the highest public offices, and if they weren’t, shame on us!
You see the “Keating Five” were members of Congress and the United States Senate. There was Senator John McCain, the recently defeated Republican presidential candidate, and Senator John Glenn, the great American astronaut. Both men despite the scandal were reelected to the Senate. Not so the other Congressmen: Alan Cranston (D-CA), Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ) and Donald Riegle (D-MI).
Keating was chairman of the Lincoln Savings & Loan Association. He went to prison for his deeds. What happened?
No less than 747 S&L’s went belly up. The ultimate cost of the crisis was $160.1 billion, about $124.6 billion of which was directly paid for by the U.S. taxpayers. The 1990 – 1991 economic recession followed. Between 1986 and 1991, the number of new homes constructed per year dropped from 1.8 million to 1 million, the lowest rate since World War II. Tens of thousands lost their jobs, many thousands their homes, and the manufacturing industry, which was reeling from competition from Japan and South East Asia, and emerging competition from Europe, was never to recover.
All the wrenching of hands, all the pointing of fingers, all the Congressional hearings, all the calls for greater regulation and oversight, all the new laws on the books, and all of the media books produced by experts and critics detailing the S&L scandal and demanding change could now be reissued from the old tag line of “S&L Scandal” to the new tag line “Bernard Madoff Scandal,” and you wouldn’t even have to edit the content. Along with the same duplication and replication of events, accusations and declarations of resolve to correct would be the same tired formulas that nobody plans to observe much less implement. The more things change the more they remain stuck.
But why?
CORPORATE SOCIETY & THE DEVILS IS IN THE DETAILS
Management guru Peter Drucker is acclaimed as “The Man Who Invented The Corporate Society,” which, incidentally, is the title of John J. Tarrant’s 1976 biography of the Austrian-American. It is a catchy title and powerful identity, but, unfortunately more than one hundred years off the mark. Not surprisingly, The Wall Street Journal and Wall Street took the Drucker mantra as gospel into the embodiment of “corpocracy.” This is explained in SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998):
“Corporate management as corpocracy: (1) treats employees as numbers not persons; (2) supports company politics at the expense of productivity; (3) uses stealth as a measure of communication; (4) finds data collection its principle product; (5) disguises its confusion with endless meetings; (6) allows markets to drift away for its fanatical internal focus; (7) hides indecision in excessive planning; (8) fears individual initiative as you never know where it might lead; (9) lives in a box walled off from the reality of work; (10) exudes overt praise for innovation while harboring covert hostility to it.”
Corporate society is a product of the Civil War, not of Peter Drucker. The Civil War allowed the Industrial Revolution to hit its full stride, explode on all its cylinders, and drive Western society out of a 600-year stalemate as essentially an agricultural and trade culture into modernity. At what price?
From the beginning of our 12,000-year history, a “cut and control” policy has prevailed. Each age sacrificed “what was” for something new, something that was desired but at the expense of something that was lost never to be regained.
This was true of the nomadic tribes of hunters and gatherers to the establishment of farms and households where property became important, then on to the age of the arts, craftsmanship and trade to the Industrial Revolution and modernity. Progress has been a double-edged blade throughout human culture. In studying this, I wrote “Near Journey’s End? Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-Indulgent Man? (2004, unpublished). My thesis was that progress has been our most important product, but with little appreciation at what price to our small planet and ourselves.
The Civil War has its industrial footprints all over it in weapons and armaments, uniforms and supplies, transportation and logistical support. Warfare was now planned, organized, coordinated, communicated, controlled, managed, and dispatched with mechanistic efficiency.
No longer was approximation good enough. Weapons and training required a precision not previously felt necessary. Virtually everything from paperwork to armaments had to meet specifications, standardization, and measurable stipulations as to efficiency, effectiveness, relevance and performance. Canons grew more sophisticated, the repeating rifle was invented, as was the submarine, and railroads became a weapon of critical import.
Sacrificed to this new high church of standardization were individuality, idiosyncrasy, independence and singular creativity that had been endemic to the American character.
Think back! Since the Civil War (1861 – 1865), American society has moved from primarily agrarian to essentially industrial to now mainly service. Complex manufacturing moved work from small guilds of individuals working together to large groups working in factories. Small towns and villages dried up with a mass exodus to new cities penciling the landscape where the jobs were.
The nuclear family of paternal dominance, which was centered on the community church was first fragmented and then destroyed. Pastoral identity where land and nature gave people a sense of place and space was gone forever. From open space where experience was direct and identity self-evident came group identity, group norms, and then identity by numbers. The close connection between doing and being was slipping away replaced by alienation from self, from work and finally from life, as it had been known. As Marcuse argues, this process has neither been acknowledge nor resolved but explained away by an ever-growing army of explainers.
Craftsmanship gave way to machines with standardized specifications, which ensured every product produced would be precisely the same. People became a product through social engineering to be classified, categorized and controlled. People were tunneled, pummeled and channeled into a predictable mass culture through compulsory public education, a rhetorical press, and an obliging clerical hierarchy. There was no room in this scheme of things for the idiosyncratic. It was important to fit in order to belong, to be like everyone else, to think, behave, believe and value what the corporate mantra claimed important.
Paradoxically, one group escaped this conforming the longest in America, and that was the African American community. During the Great Depression more than 80 percent of African Americans were in two parent families. The African American community church was center to their lives. Crime was uncommon while community support of each other was the norm.
The Civil Rights Movement was successful in desegregating schools, in passing the voting rights act, and equal opportunity under the law, thus improving upward mobility, but at what price? African Americans were last to embrace corpocracy, and now they share the same corporate identity and angst.
From birth to death, we measure our significance on what we have as a measure of what we are. It is so ingrained in our consciousness we don’t question it. We neither question the absurdity of political polls and best selling lists, and now thousands of websites that instruct us in how to live our lives, nor do we question the morbid absurdity of celebrity worship. Think of it. Celebrities are people we don’t know, will never meet, and have no idea who they are. Politicians, CEOs, and leaders everywhere are measuring their worth in terms of their celebrity pollster appeal. We have become an empty suit society.
We are also a nation of strangers who takes the word of an expert to our own experience. We have lost something since the Civil War.
Abraham Lincoln was self-taught with no formal education, a captain in the militia during the Black Hawk War, where he never saw action. In contrast, the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was a graduate of West Point, a decorated regiment commander in the Mexican War, and Secretary of War in President Franklin Pierce’s administration (1853 – 1857). Davis was a groomed corporate type. Lincoln was not.
Lincoln, however, read and absorbed works on military history and strategy so that historian T. Harry Williams concluded: “Lincoln stands out as a great war president, probably the greatest in our history, and a great natural strategist, a better one than any of his generals.” Lincoln was an outsider; Davis an insider.
Today, we are obsessed with being insiders. You aren’t considered intelligent unless you have a high “I.Q”; not ready for college without a superior SAT score, or graduate school without the required GRE levels.
So what do students do to boost their scores? They take courses that focus on the test, not on the learning they have acquired. Indeed, elementary and secondary education today is geared to a test score, not to learning, per se. Learning is not relevant! Blame the government that insists on classifying schools in terms of standardized test scores to determine allocation of Federal Funds. Psychometrics is a product of corpocracy.
Fifty years after the Civil War, corporate society became so embedded in the American culture that no one thereafter could remember the difference.
In the “Electronic Age,” this has grown from the sublime to the ridiculous. Even president-elect Barak Obama will not be without his BlackBerry. Nerds across America see this as good. I see it as scary. Everything is being reduced to an electronic grid.
Notice that the Secretary of Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve came up with a $700 billion bailout of the subprime real estate meltdown with no idea why it was $700 billion instead of $200 billion, or a $1 trillion. It was a number picked out of a rabbit’s hat with sophisticated algorithms of justification, reflecting the corporate sense of being trapped. Marcuse anticipated this when he said a one-dimensional society is locked in to its technological rationality with no escape. Notice, too, that those receiving billions of this bailout have not behaved as expected.
This is not all that surprising. Corporate society expects people to act like inanimate objects to be manipulated. Having killed the spirit of individuals, corpocracy has made people into empty constructs. This fits nicely into electronic algorithms, but doesn’t set too well with man’s primordial instinct to survive. As T. S. Eliot puts it:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw, Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
And elsewhere:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
We see this shadow in television comedy. We don’t want to be reminded of the shabby equipment of the neglected self. Instead, we prefer to retreat into sexual innuendo which is not funny, but entertains a blunted mindset that fails to see the ridiculous in self- ridicule. If we do not respect ourselves, who should; if we don’t display dignity, who should we blame?
Television drama is not of human conflict but a menu of mechanistic violence for an audience that has forgotten how to feel. The corporate mind has to be shocked to attention with the display of body parts, guts and gore in heinous crime. Men with the smirk of knowing and the women with uplifting bras to give them cleavage of authenticity solve these crimes with robotic precision. No one seems to wonder about this. Hard-boiled detective stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler had more heart
Celebrity corrals the juvenile mind of all ages into obedience with the likes of “American Idol.” Here young people surrender the coin of dignity to corporate embarrassment. For shame, they mount a dream of passion, which might better be spent learning how to read a book and master Euclidean geometry to a more satisfying and predictable end. They seek celebrity as if corporate adoration could supplant self-approval.
There is no heart in corpocracy. So, it substitutes fame, fortune and promotion. Corporations rise, and fall, writing off their demise as a matter of business as other corporate jackals pick up the pieces to realize a return on the carcass. Nary a thought is paid to the tens of thousands of wrecked lives due to corporate indifference. Corporate speak, “We had no choice.”
For the longest time, I’ve thought the problem was a matter of leadership, and it is, but it is impossible to produce leaders out of corpocracy. It is the antithesis of leadership.
WHY CORPORATE SOCIETY CANNOT LEAD
Corpocracy produced Jefferson Davis but not Abraham Lincoln. Davis had his eye on the prize of saving his southern lifestyle (instrumental value); Lincoln had his eye on the political objective of saving the union (terminal value). Lincoln’s objective was always political, never military, per se.
The antebellum culture of the prairie produced Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln and never anyone close to them since. Without leadership, we have followed not led technological change.
After the Civil War, America had no room for individuality. The Republic had moved progressively away from individuality to systemic relevance with increasing regimentation, integration and control.
In last forty years, television has gone from Beta to VHS to DVD to HDTV, and now in February 2009 all television programming will be digital. Explosive change has become a norm, but at what expense? I claim it has left the individual behind. Newspapers and magazines, and even books are disappearing as our world revolves around an impersonal grid of bouncing electrons across a flat screen while GPS tracking devices capture our every move. George Orwell anticipated this in “1984,” seeing us being constantly watched by such devices so that privacy once enjoyed was sinking away like a fading star.
Corpocracy is not about people. It is about numbers, always numbers. Its indicators are numbers; its planning are numbers; its long and short term decisions are numbers; its calibrated priorities are numbers. Is it any wonder that corporate accountancy should be flawed; that scandals should be associated with a society that values numbers more than it values people? We have become Eliot’s “hollow men”:
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear;
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star
And elsewhere:
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to Dust.
The Civil War created the momentum, which found home schooling on the farm moving inevitably to compulsory education in the schoolhouse. Compulsory education was geared to a controlled classroom with a fixed curriculum designed to serve corporate society’s needs. This extended to uniform dress, manners, mores, and morals conducive to conforming behavior. Students were channeled into narrow roles consistent with the demands of skilled and unskilled labor. Whereas farm hands and farm owners centered on the farm, now work centered on the corporate workplace and its owners who more than likely owned workers’ dwellings as well as the company store.
THE FORGOTTEN AMERICAN
Americans have had a history of being energetic, positive, optimistic, creative, independent, individualistic and self-determining. Much of this has been lost or turned into catchy slogans and synthetic models, leaving the genuine article behind.
Think back! In the early to late nineteenth century, America produced artists, artisans, philosophers, poets, dramatists and authentic heroes.
James Fenimore Cooper wrote “The Spy” (1821) and “The Last of the Mohicans” (1826); Herman Melville wrote the greatest American novel, “Moby Dick” (1851); Walt Whitman, wrote America’s greatest poem, “Leaves of Grass” (1855); Stephen Crane, wrote America’s first great war novel, “The Red Badge of Courage” (1895); Henry David Thoreau, showed America’s independent spirit moving to the Walden woods of Concord, and wrote “Walden” (1854); Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote “The Scarlet Letter” (1850), Ralph Waldo Emerson, arguably America’s greatest philosopher, wrote a series of essays that captured the American conscience (1841 – 1844), as well as being the leader of Transcendentalism, an intuitional religious movement; Edgar Allan Poe, wrote The Raven” (1845).
These mainly forgotten Americans had no choice but to grow from the inside out. Walt Whitman went to school until he was eleven and then did odd jobs most of his life inventing the prosody of language that came to be his poetry. Herman Melville went to sea as his Yale. Edgar Allan Poe’s brief stormy life included a short stint at college and in the military. He became the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living at the craft. Although dying at the age of 40, he managed to perfect the American short story, invent the mystery novel, and write lyrical poetry.
Henry James gave us “The American” (1877) and “The European” (1878) revealing his ambivalent allegiance. William James, Henry’s older brother, turned away from his brother’s European pique to immerse himself in Americana. He produced America’s own psychology (“The Principles of Psychology,” 1890), an American take on religion (“The Varieties of Religious Experience,” 1902) and America’s own philosophy (“Pragmatism,” 1907).
These Americans, hardly corporate types, have been much copied but seldom surpassed.
It wasn’t only the United States, but Europe was in a creative verve before corporate society took hold, a vitality that corporate society would exploit to its advantage in the twentieth century capitalizing on the inventions of the nineteenth century with technological dominance. To wit:
English chemist Humphry Davy invents the first electric light – the first arc lamp (1809) that American Thomas Edison makes practical with the carbon-filament light bulb (1879). Edison also invents the phonograph and motion picture (1877), which Eadweard Muybridge tops with the first motion picture machine (1877). Edison also discovers thermionic emission (1883), the basis of the electronic valve.
W. A. Burt, an American, invents the typewriter (1829), which Christopher Scholes makes practical with his invention (1867). Frenchmen, Barthelemy Thimonnier invents a sewing machine (1830), improved by the invention of American Elias Howe (1845), and made commercial with Isaac Singer’s sewing machine (1851). Cyrus McCormick, an American, invents the first commercially successful reaper (1831).
Englishman Michael Faraday invents an electric dynamo (1831. Henry Talbot invents photography (1834); Samuel Morse invents Morse code (1838). American Charles Goodyear invents rubber vulcanization (1839). Samuel Slocum patents the stapler (1841).
Dr. William Morton, an American, is the first to use anesthesia for tooth extraction (1846). Walter Hunt invents the safety pin (1849); Joel Houghton receives a patent for a dishwasher (1849). John Tyndall demonstrates the principles of fiber optics (1854), which 150 years later will change the world of communication.
Louis Pasteur invents pasteurization (1856). Hamilton Smith patents the rotary washing machine (1858). Jean Lenoir invents an internal combustion engine (1858). Alfred Nobel invents dynamite (1866).
Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone (1876). Nicolaus August Otto invents first practical four-stroke internal combustion engine (1876). Rudolf Diesel invents the diesel-fueled internal combustion engine (1892). James Dewar invents the Dear vacuum flask. W. L. Judson invents the zipper (1893); Lumiere Brothers invent the portable motion-picture camera.
Significant of a majority of these inventions is that they were by non-scientists, non-academics and in relative isolation with little or no access to others working on the same things, thus the replication.
Moreover, it was Thomas Edison, among others, in the late nineteenth century that took up the corporate idea of a place (Menlo Park) with several people working on inventions for which he would take full credit for more than a thousand patents. This was true of Nikola Tesla, the Croatian electrical engineer, who immigrated to America and worked for Edison at Menlo Park (see “Tesla: Man Out of Time” by Margaret Cheney). Tesla was responsible for scores of patents including alternating current (A/C), which Edison attempted to first take credit for, and when he couldn’t, attempted to sabotage.
It is no accident that one of the first things you sign over when you become an employee of Corporate America is anything you might create, invent or improve upon while so employed.
THE LOST GARDEN OF INDIVIDUALITY
We Americans are nostalgic, and when we are lost, as we are now, there is an incessant need to go back to our roots, to the garden of our beliefs, myths and invented history. We no longer embrace reality and struggle. We choose to deny them.
When corpocracy was in its infancy, a phenomenon such as American born British poet, T. S. Eliot, had the audacity to create, “The Waste Land” (1922), which captured the future in crystallized prosody. It is difficult to imagine such originality and daring today.
Instead, corruption is on our plate. It is a recipe for self-destruction. It spoils achievement with its fraudulent premise. We don’t like to see ourselves as we are, but as we would like to be seen. We chase the buck; we no longer chase the dream. For the past quarter century, the best and brightest have opted for financial engineering to electrical, chemical, and mechanical engineering, earning MBA’s to develop financial instruments to make money out of money, but produce nothing real, nothing substantial, nothing that could justify their careers. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman puts a $400 billion price tag on this annual “waste, fraud and abuse.” The future has caught up with us, and it is not a pretty sight. We have lost our brassy boldness to self-conscious self-pity.
It is no accident that the presidency of Andrew Jackson and the “Age of Jackson” is producing a spate of books, films, articles, doctorate studies, profiles, monographs and interviews of people producing this avalanche of materials. Why, you ask, is Jackson so important now?
Jackson embodies the America left behind. He is not the plastic man in the empty suit that Garry Wills writes about in “John Wayne’s America” (1997) with the subtitle “Politics of Celebrity.” Wayne didn’t opt to fight for his country in WWII, he instead decided to play heroes on the screen while men his age sweated and died for real in that war. He became the personification of corporate man out for himself but with a swagger and a drawl. Garry Wills writes:
“He (John Wayne) embodies the American myth. The archetypal American is a displaced person – arrived from a rejected past, breaking into a glorious future, on the move, fearless himself, feared by others, a killer for cleansing the world of things that ‘need killing,’ loving but not bound down by love, rootless but carrying the center in himself, a gyroscopic direction-setter, a traveling norm.”
Reading this you can see how it reflects the one-dimensional American character.
Now, Jackson was a different sort. He rose out of the wild, fought bravely as a boy of fourteen in the American Revolution, seeing his brother murdered, seething with revenge all his life against the British, and getting his satisfaction at the “Battle of New Orleans.’
Thomas Jefferson found Jackson bizarre, uncouth, unschooled, and a danger to American society. Jackson never attended regular school, was a frontiersman and climbed the latter of success by pure grip, guts, gumption and grizzle. He never read books, and prided himself in reading people and events. He was the real deal, not a one-dimensional man like John Wayne. Jackson was the quintessential man-of-action, and decisive to a fault.
To this day, moving into 2009, the eastern United States remains a different country than Jackson’s hinterland, where he put his indelible mark. The east still looks to Europe for its grandness, society, its manners and culture, which is quite different to countrified Jacksonians. The Washington, DC beltway is a surreal cocoon of politicians and lobbyists living in a satellite world that has little in common with twenty-first Jackson country.
There was corruption in Jackson’s day. Indeed, he was so direct about his favoritism that his administration was tagged the “spoils system.” On his first inauguration as president – he had actually won the office four years before but was denied the presidency – he often went over Congress to rally the people. President Barak Obama should keep this in mind.
Dr. Fisher, is this another one of your polemics? I don’t think so. New York Times columnist and popular author Thomas Friedman shows similar concern as 2008 winds down. He writes:
“Our present crisis is not just a financial meltdown crying out for a cash injection. We are in much deeper trouble. In fact, we as a country have become General Motors as a result of our national drift. That’s why we don’t just need a bailout. We need to reboot. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis -- we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely. It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing-infrastructure-without building white elephants. . If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us. . . Obama needs to lead us on a journey to rediscover, rebuild and reinvent our own backyard.”
To do that, we will have to supplant our dependence on a corporate mentality that is the negative of all these positives. We need to return to the restless energy and the common drive of individualism of the past. We need to recast the nation in substantive work
Sunday, December 21, 2008
ETHICS & SAVVY CAPITALISM!
ETHICS & SAVVY CAPITALISM!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 21, 2008
“Conduct (ethics) is the great profession. Behavior is the perpetual revealing of us. What a man does, tell us what he is.”
Frederick D. Huntington (1819 – 1904), American clergyman
A WRITER WRITES:
I have broken a relationship with a firm designed to help the disadvantage, as I find them unethical. My role as a venture capitalist was to lead this nonprofit start up company into servicing the community, making it a better place. Clearly, their interests and aim are not that but solely for profit.
Jim, I thought you might be able to commiserate, if not give me added perspective, on my first entry today, entitled, “You & Ethical Companies.” www.savvycapitalist.blogspot.com
Ted
* * * * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Ted,
I find your word “commiserate” interesting, as you should know by now I am not too good at consoling. As true as I find your blog consistent with the way you think, I fail to see the ethical implications. Permit me to explain.
You are selling here, but not explaining, justifying your angst, but not elucidating. My take on ethics is this: "It works to the advantage of self and others and does no harm."
I’m speaking now of the short Q&A content of your blog (mentioned above). While I see no problem with it, I don't quite understand your intentions or the impact you expect.
You have accused a business association of which you have been involved as being "unethical," while not explaining what you mean by ethics, as if "being ethical" is self-explanatory, which clearly it is not. Ethics is a meeting of the mind with the mind of the one who would be ethical, nothing more, nothing less.
Is ethics conduct? Is it morality?
Of course, it is both along with set standards, standards that have become dodgy in our materialistic society; otherwise we wouldn't create such characters as Ponzi, Madoff and Abramoff, not to mention (Martha) Stewart and (Governor) Blagojevich, among others. They, I would imagine in their rationalizations, attempted to self-delude themselves into thinking what "is legal" is necessarily also "ethical," when seldom is the case in my experience.
Whether it is "for profit" or "non profit," capitalistic, socialistic or communistic, the society of man has had an inordinate capacity to be unethical.
Pardon me for quoting Epictetus (c 50 - c 150 AD)here, which I do rather often because we are not improving, as a society as we acquire more electronic toys and more recreational distractions from ethical considerations.
Epictetus said nearly 2,000 years ago:
"In all the affairs of life, let it be your great care, not to hurt your mind, or offend your judgment. And this rule, if observed carefully in all your deportment will be a mighty security to your undertakings."
"Do no harm," is the way I put it, either to others or myself. I have walked away from a number of such occasions, nearly all of which I've written about. I'll share one with you now.
* * * * *
When I was 27 years old, a chemical sales engineer with Nalco Chemical Company, father of three small children, and active in my community, being Secretary of the Zoning Board of Appeals of Marion County (Indianapolis, Indiana), I was successful and ambitious.
A man with whom I was working, thirteen years older than I was, and relatively well off, said he wanted to go in business with me in the purchase of virgin land on a main thoroughfare out of Indianapolis on which I planned to build a medical-professional building.
The land cost $30,000 and was 27 acres with a railroad spur. I was not a rich man but a saver. He told me to go ahead and put the $3,000 down necessary to hold the land, and he would write a check for the balance the following Monday. I was the idea guy with my medi-pro complex, complete with architectural blueprints, and he was the venture capitalist.
Over the weekend, he got cold feet. He cried on the phone with all kinds of justification, asked me to be understanding. All I could think of as I listened was, ‘I am out of all of my savings!'
Then I thought I would go downtown to the attorney for this major builder in the area and state my situation. I did so the following Monday nervous beyond measure.
The attorney listened dutifully, then called the builder, explained who I was and my situation, and the builder said to the attorney, "Let me talk to him."
I got on the phone, and he said, "Sorry, young man, you're out of $3,000, and there's nothing I can do about it."
I'm an emotional guy, but I had had to think on my feet several times already at age 27. "Sir," I said, "can I ask you a question?"
"Yesss," he said hesitantly clearly wondering where this was going.
"You do want to sell this land?”
“Yes, of course, I do. That’s why it’s up for sale."
“I've lived in the area for five years now, sir, and that 'for sale' sign has been there for at least three years."
"So?"
"I don't think you want to take my $3,000 without justification. You want to sell the land."
"See here, young man, I've had a legal contract with you and your partner, and you have failed to live up to it."
"I'm not disputing that. You are correct. But I have a proposition to make to you."
"Such as?"
"You keep my $3,000, and I will pay you $3,000 every quarter over the next four quarters for a total of $15,000. If I don't sell your land in that time for the full amount of $30,000, you have $15,000 of my money with no obligation to return it should I fail in my quest to sell the land."
"Those are not very favorable terms to you."
"But they are, sir."
"How so?"
"I'm a salesman and they give me great incentive to sell the land."
"Put the attorney back on the line." I did. They talked. He put the phone down and shook his head.
"How old are you?" I told him. "You're not going to have any trouble in this life."
I smiled. "I am if I don't sell the land."
IT DOESN'T END HERE!
Over the next three months, I did due diligence to sell the land. Then I got a buyer who needed the land "right now" to build a plant for a foreign contract that had to be filled within the next year. My land had a rail spur, accessible to heavy equipment and truck transport, and was ideal.
He didn't negotiate a selling price, but simply said, "My firm will give you $50,000 for the land, draw up the papers with your attorneys and we'll close the deal." (For reference, that would be the equivalent in 2008 dollars of about $500,000)
Then we found there was a glitch, one that I should have noted, but hadn’t. The land was zoned "suburban industrial” (SUI), and not "urban industrial" (UI). The difference on metropolitan zoning restrictions was a matter of a stamped “S."
The builder needed to put a road through the property for ingress and egress of trucks, and the 15-foot required on either size of the road for SUI was too restricting for the plant the company intended to build.
"Get this restriction changed in the next 36 hours and you have a deal." That was impossible because the Zoning Board met only once a month. Usually, it took two or more months for changes to be made, as it had to go through the mayor and city council as well.
There was one possibility: have the “S” removed from documentation. Who would know? Give the recorder a $5,000 "bonus" – he happened to be an acquaintance, someone who liked me. Who would be the wiser?
I never told my wife, but thought about it, made a visit to my church, sat there and played tag with my mind for a long time in that empty church, and then got up from the pew a changed man. I WOULD KNOW! FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE, I WOULD ALWAYS KNOW I WAS A FRAUD.
I called the man and told him "no deal." It couldn't be changed in time, I said, and likely would not have been changed at all. Suburban industrial expansion was going in that direction. He thanked me, and that was it. But it wasn't. It prepared me for South Africa and everything else that has come down the road.
IT DIDN’T END THERE EITHER!
It was the fourth quarter, and I had already given the builder $12,000 of the $30,000 agreed to for the purchase, and was soon to give him the final $3,000 without any prospects of selling the land. Every attempt to sell it had failed.
It was December more than forty years ago, three weeks from when the final payment was due of $18,000, and I got a call. “I understand you have some land for sale. It is right near an auto dealership in which I have an interest. I live in Ocala, Florida. I’ve been up here in Kentucky buying horses, and I heard of about your property. It is just what I need. “What are you asking for it?”
In the intervening year, I had been promoted to area manager of Kentucky and was living in Anchorage, Kentucky, a suburb of Louisville, Kentucky. I’ve always hated talking on the phone, need to see people in person, so as a phone conversationalist, I’m often silent, driving the person on the other end of the line a little frantic. “You there?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“What are you asking?”
Again silence, as I had no idea what I should ask, certainly not $50,000 because it couldn’t be used for urban industrial purposes. “Well, here’s the deal,” he said, breaking the silence, “I’m willing to pay you $35,000 for it, and would like it on the books before the end of the year.”
I was euphoric. ‘He would like it on the books! I had to have it on the books!’ “Where are you now?” I asked. He was in Lexington, Kentucky. “Well, I’m right down the road as you come into Louisville.” I explained where I lived.
My home some place. Although out in the country, it was near the city, preserved to be almost antebellum in its southern ambience. I mention this because he seemed reassured when he came to the house. We completed our business within the week before Christmas.
IT STILL DIDN’T END THERE!
As mentioned earlier, I am rather high strung, and it sometimes gets in the way of my thinking. I paid off the builder, and had a nice nest egg of savings for my year of anguish. But then in February of the following year, I received a call from the builder.
“My accountant tells me you overpaid us by $3,000. A check is in the mail. Sorry about that.” He didn’t say anything else, not nice to be doing business with you or anything, just that, “A check is in the mail.”
With this surprised check of overpayment, which I think was a matter of exuberance from selling the land, I completely finished the large basement of this three story house with an elaborate study bookcases all around, fire place, and a completely finished playroom separate from the study for the children. My family had increased in the year from three to four little ones.
* * * * *
Therefore, Ted, when I think of these people that have not had a "come to Jesus meeting" like I did, I have only empathy and understanding for them. I know how easy it is to fall off the log, to consider putting one over on others, which means as Epictetus said 2,000 years ago, is to attempt to put one over on ourselves. It never works. I know. I have met that enemy and it was I.
The moment we think we are ethical and do not have the same bloodline as the unethical is the moment we move away from the human race.
My da, who stopped being educated after seven grades of Irish Parochial Catholic education, once said to me, "Don't me impressed with the wealthy. Chances are they have met the devil at one time or another and became fast friends. It is very hard but not impossible, Jimmy, to make a fortune without such contact, but so rare I can't think of anyone who has managed that in my lifetime." Nor have I in mine. But I have known people with similar experiences to mine.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 21, 2008
“Conduct (ethics) is the great profession. Behavior is the perpetual revealing of us. What a man does, tell us what he is.”
Frederick D. Huntington (1819 – 1904), American clergyman
A WRITER WRITES:
I have broken a relationship with a firm designed to help the disadvantage, as I find them unethical. My role as a venture capitalist was to lead this nonprofit start up company into servicing the community, making it a better place. Clearly, their interests and aim are not that but solely for profit.
Jim, I thought you might be able to commiserate, if not give me added perspective, on my first entry today, entitled, “You & Ethical Companies.” www.savvycapitalist.blogspot.com
Ted
* * * * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Ted,
I find your word “commiserate” interesting, as you should know by now I am not too good at consoling. As true as I find your blog consistent with the way you think, I fail to see the ethical implications. Permit me to explain.
You are selling here, but not explaining, justifying your angst, but not elucidating. My take on ethics is this: "It works to the advantage of self and others and does no harm."
I’m speaking now of the short Q&A content of your blog (mentioned above). While I see no problem with it, I don't quite understand your intentions or the impact you expect.
You have accused a business association of which you have been involved as being "unethical," while not explaining what you mean by ethics, as if "being ethical" is self-explanatory, which clearly it is not. Ethics is a meeting of the mind with the mind of the one who would be ethical, nothing more, nothing less.
Is ethics conduct? Is it morality?
Of course, it is both along with set standards, standards that have become dodgy in our materialistic society; otherwise we wouldn't create such characters as Ponzi, Madoff and Abramoff, not to mention (Martha) Stewart and (Governor) Blagojevich, among others. They, I would imagine in their rationalizations, attempted to self-delude themselves into thinking what "is legal" is necessarily also "ethical," when seldom is the case in my experience.
Whether it is "for profit" or "non profit," capitalistic, socialistic or communistic, the society of man has had an inordinate capacity to be unethical.
Pardon me for quoting Epictetus (c 50 - c 150 AD)here, which I do rather often because we are not improving, as a society as we acquire more electronic toys and more recreational distractions from ethical considerations.
Epictetus said nearly 2,000 years ago:
"In all the affairs of life, let it be your great care, not to hurt your mind, or offend your judgment. And this rule, if observed carefully in all your deportment will be a mighty security to your undertakings."
"Do no harm," is the way I put it, either to others or myself. I have walked away from a number of such occasions, nearly all of which I've written about. I'll share one with you now.
* * * * *
When I was 27 years old, a chemical sales engineer with Nalco Chemical Company, father of three small children, and active in my community, being Secretary of the Zoning Board of Appeals of Marion County (Indianapolis, Indiana), I was successful and ambitious.
A man with whom I was working, thirteen years older than I was, and relatively well off, said he wanted to go in business with me in the purchase of virgin land on a main thoroughfare out of Indianapolis on which I planned to build a medical-professional building.
The land cost $30,000 and was 27 acres with a railroad spur. I was not a rich man but a saver. He told me to go ahead and put the $3,000 down necessary to hold the land, and he would write a check for the balance the following Monday. I was the idea guy with my medi-pro complex, complete with architectural blueprints, and he was the venture capitalist.
Over the weekend, he got cold feet. He cried on the phone with all kinds of justification, asked me to be understanding. All I could think of as I listened was, ‘I am out of all of my savings!'
Then I thought I would go downtown to the attorney for this major builder in the area and state my situation. I did so the following Monday nervous beyond measure.
The attorney listened dutifully, then called the builder, explained who I was and my situation, and the builder said to the attorney, "Let me talk to him."
I got on the phone, and he said, "Sorry, young man, you're out of $3,000, and there's nothing I can do about it."
I'm an emotional guy, but I had had to think on my feet several times already at age 27. "Sir," I said, "can I ask you a question?"
"Yesss," he said hesitantly clearly wondering where this was going.
"You do want to sell this land?”
“Yes, of course, I do. That’s why it’s up for sale."
“I've lived in the area for five years now, sir, and that 'for sale' sign has been there for at least three years."
"So?"
"I don't think you want to take my $3,000 without justification. You want to sell the land."
"See here, young man, I've had a legal contract with you and your partner, and you have failed to live up to it."
"I'm not disputing that. You are correct. But I have a proposition to make to you."
"Such as?"
"You keep my $3,000, and I will pay you $3,000 every quarter over the next four quarters for a total of $15,000. If I don't sell your land in that time for the full amount of $30,000, you have $15,000 of my money with no obligation to return it should I fail in my quest to sell the land."
"Those are not very favorable terms to you."
"But they are, sir."
"How so?"
"I'm a salesman and they give me great incentive to sell the land."
"Put the attorney back on the line." I did. They talked. He put the phone down and shook his head.
"How old are you?" I told him. "You're not going to have any trouble in this life."
I smiled. "I am if I don't sell the land."
IT DOESN'T END HERE!
Over the next three months, I did due diligence to sell the land. Then I got a buyer who needed the land "right now" to build a plant for a foreign contract that had to be filled within the next year. My land had a rail spur, accessible to heavy equipment and truck transport, and was ideal.
He didn't negotiate a selling price, but simply said, "My firm will give you $50,000 for the land, draw up the papers with your attorneys and we'll close the deal." (For reference, that would be the equivalent in 2008 dollars of about $500,000)
Then we found there was a glitch, one that I should have noted, but hadn’t. The land was zoned "suburban industrial” (SUI), and not "urban industrial" (UI). The difference on metropolitan zoning restrictions was a matter of a stamped “S."
The builder needed to put a road through the property for ingress and egress of trucks, and the 15-foot required on either size of the road for SUI was too restricting for the plant the company intended to build.
"Get this restriction changed in the next 36 hours and you have a deal." That was impossible because the Zoning Board met only once a month. Usually, it took two or more months for changes to be made, as it had to go through the mayor and city council as well.
There was one possibility: have the “S” removed from documentation. Who would know? Give the recorder a $5,000 "bonus" – he happened to be an acquaintance, someone who liked me. Who would be the wiser?
I never told my wife, but thought about it, made a visit to my church, sat there and played tag with my mind for a long time in that empty church, and then got up from the pew a changed man. I WOULD KNOW! FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE, I WOULD ALWAYS KNOW I WAS A FRAUD.
I called the man and told him "no deal." It couldn't be changed in time, I said, and likely would not have been changed at all. Suburban industrial expansion was going in that direction. He thanked me, and that was it. But it wasn't. It prepared me for South Africa and everything else that has come down the road.
IT DIDN’T END THERE EITHER!
It was the fourth quarter, and I had already given the builder $12,000 of the $30,000 agreed to for the purchase, and was soon to give him the final $3,000 without any prospects of selling the land. Every attempt to sell it had failed.
It was December more than forty years ago, three weeks from when the final payment was due of $18,000, and I got a call. “I understand you have some land for sale. It is right near an auto dealership in which I have an interest. I live in Ocala, Florida. I’ve been up here in Kentucky buying horses, and I heard of about your property. It is just what I need. “What are you asking for it?”
In the intervening year, I had been promoted to area manager of Kentucky and was living in Anchorage, Kentucky, a suburb of Louisville, Kentucky. I’ve always hated talking on the phone, need to see people in person, so as a phone conversationalist, I’m often silent, driving the person on the other end of the line a little frantic. “You there?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“What are you asking?”
Again silence, as I had no idea what I should ask, certainly not $50,000 because it couldn’t be used for urban industrial purposes. “Well, here’s the deal,” he said, breaking the silence, “I’m willing to pay you $35,000 for it, and would like it on the books before the end of the year.”
I was euphoric. ‘He would like it on the books! I had to have it on the books!’ “Where are you now?” I asked. He was in Lexington, Kentucky. “Well, I’m right down the road as you come into Louisville.” I explained where I lived.
My home some place. Although out in the country, it was near the city, preserved to be almost antebellum in its southern ambience. I mention this because he seemed reassured when he came to the house. We completed our business within the week before Christmas.
IT STILL DIDN’T END THERE!
As mentioned earlier, I am rather high strung, and it sometimes gets in the way of my thinking. I paid off the builder, and had a nice nest egg of savings for my year of anguish. But then in February of the following year, I received a call from the builder.
“My accountant tells me you overpaid us by $3,000. A check is in the mail. Sorry about that.” He didn’t say anything else, not nice to be doing business with you or anything, just that, “A check is in the mail.”
With this surprised check of overpayment, which I think was a matter of exuberance from selling the land, I completely finished the large basement of this three story house with an elaborate study bookcases all around, fire place, and a completely finished playroom separate from the study for the children. My family had increased in the year from three to four little ones.
* * * * *
Therefore, Ted, when I think of these people that have not had a "come to Jesus meeting" like I did, I have only empathy and understanding for them. I know how easy it is to fall off the log, to consider putting one over on others, which means as Epictetus said 2,000 years ago, is to attempt to put one over on ourselves. It never works. I know. I have met that enemy and it was I.
The moment we think we are ethical and do not have the same bloodline as the unethical is the moment we move away from the human race.
My da, who stopped being educated after seven grades of Irish Parochial Catholic education, once said to me, "Don't me impressed with the wealthy. Chances are they have met the devil at one time or another and became fast friends. It is very hard but not impossible, Jimmy, to make a fortune without such contact, but so rare I can't think of anyone who has managed that in my lifetime." Nor have I in mine. But I have known people with similar experiences to mine.
Be always well,
Jim
Saturday, December 20, 2008
THE RIVER OF TIME (a poem written in 1969)
MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ONE AND ALL, AND TO ALL HAPPY NEW YEAR!
When you reach my stage in life, you have no idea how many more years God has allotted to you, so each day is precious. Over the years, I have received countless comments about my missives, many of them much more profound than mine. I thank you all for them. Some have been critical, even angry, many more not, but all have been appreciated.
My wonder, always, is why when someone finds reason to criticize, and then later apologize, as there is no need. I am always delighted to receive comments, and am moved by the eloquence and passion of them.
By the accident of our birth, we are on this same "River of Life" at the same time, all moving in the same inevitable direction, all equally important in the eyes of God, and no one more or less significant than the other.
* * * * *
Forty years ago (1969), back from South Africa, I wrote a novel (never published) called "The Triple Fool" (after John Donne's poem of the same name). In that novel, I wrote a poem inspired by an Ovid (43 BC - 17 AD) quote from “Metamorphoses” (6 AD). In Latin, the quote reads: "Tempus edax rerum," or "Time, the devourer of all things."
To put my poem in context, I was returning from that African country, young and successful, but disillusioned with what I had experienced with its apartheid policy of separated development of the races. Coming from Iowa, a state with very few African Americans, I had never experienced real dominance of whites over blacks. In fact, there were so few blacks in my hometown of Clinton, Iowa that I barely knew the race existed. In South Africa, the Bantu or blacks were some 14 million citizens of negligible rights dominated and subjugated by 4 million whites of Dutch and British origin. Always somewhat of a serious person, it is evident in this poem that I come by it naturally.
Incidentally, I was very much into the stream of conscience writing of James Joyce at the time, as was the novel. Moreover, the main character, Harry, often had a conversation with his books in Latin in his study. My wonder, do anyone else’s books speak to them?
JRF
* * * * *
TIME IS A RIVER
James R. Fisher, Jr.
© January 1969
Ever moving ever changing ever enchanting ever vexing
Forging through space
Climbing to mountains and sky
Cascading unto parch earth and green valleys
Growing muddy and putrefying
Ever decaying ever stinking ever polluting ever stagnating
Becoming clear lucid pure sparkling happy invigorating refreshing
Gravitating from frigidity coldness coolness to comfort warmth hotness incontinent heat
Exploding particulate matter into flotsam and jetsam
Exposing arrogance aloofness stupidity affection flippancy irrationality
Bringing peace satisfaction power convenience temporality
Surrendering solace fulfillment tranquility transcendence essence
Experimenting with fear hate envy lust greed deceit pleasure courage happiness music
Searching for valor love hope beauty charity faith kindness caring
Creating chaos by raging abandoning destroying disfiguring lying distorting scarring killing
Inundating indiscriminately presumptively
Ever singing ever praising ever soothing ever titillating ever mesmerizing ever enticing ever fantasizing ever duping ever using ever toying
Offering to play pray sport escape entertain travel dream nourish know see think feel
Making love laughter music war hate peace tomorrow
Causing growth atrophy health debility inspiration apathy discovery disillusionment
Establishing order by producing reproducing transforming transplanting transmutating transmigrating transmitting transmogrifying
Ever balancing every imbalancing ever taking ever giving
Emulsifying demulsifying foaming defoaming coagulating dispersing scaling softening corroding electroplating sequestering precipitating hurting helping killing saving losing winning hating loving bombing building destroying remaking upsetting stabilizing confusing elucidating excoriating nurturing acidizing neutralizing beginning ending coloring discoloring oxidizing reducing liquefying solidifying catabolizing fermenting
Influent to
Effluent from
Nunc fluens of time
Tota simul of eternity
Being born existing living dying
Being buried
Eon after eon after eon
Without a rhyme to or reason for
Without a known fons et origo or a fathomable terminus
With only a promised PROMISE promised
Transporting this fragile tissue hope mankind by a swift noiseless pulling mysterious gentle ceaseless subtle mighty treacherous conflicting fascinating sweeping force
With an IRRESISTBE CURRENT
Carrying all to a SEA OF LIGHT or a SEA OF DOUBT.
JRF
When you reach my stage in life, you have no idea how many more years God has allotted to you, so each day is precious. Over the years, I have received countless comments about my missives, many of them much more profound than mine. I thank you all for them. Some have been critical, even angry, many more not, but all have been appreciated.
My wonder, always, is why when someone finds reason to criticize, and then later apologize, as there is no need. I am always delighted to receive comments, and am moved by the eloquence and passion of them.
By the accident of our birth, we are on this same "River of Life" at the same time, all moving in the same inevitable direction, all equally important in the eyes of God, and no one more or less significant than the other.
* * * * *
Forty years ago (1969), back from South Africa, I wrote a novel (never published) called "The Triple Fool" (after John Donne's poem of the same name). In that novel, I wrote a poem inspired by an Ovid (43 BC - 17 AD) quote from “Metamorphoses” (6 AD). In Latin, the quote reads: "Tempus edax rerum," or "Time, the devourer of all things."
To put my poem in context, I was returning from that African country, young and successful, but disillusioned with what I had experienced with its apartheid policy of separated development of the races. Coming from Iowa, a state with very few African Americans, I had never experienced real dominance of whites over blacks. In fact, there were so few blacks in my hometown of Clinton, Iowa that I barely knew the race existed. In South Africa, the Bantu or blacks were some 14 million citizens of negligible rights dominated and subjugated by 4 million whites of Dutch and British origin. Always somewhat of a serious person, it is evident in this poem that I come by it naturally.
Incidentally, I was very much into the stream of conscience writing of James Joyce at the time, as was the novel. Moreover, the main character, Harry, often had a conversation with his books in Latin in his study. My wonder, do anyone else’s books speak to them?
JRF
* * * * *
TIME IS A RIVER
James R. Fisher, Jr.
© January 1969
Ever moving ever changing ever enchanting ever vexing
Forging through space
Climbing to mountains and sky
Cascading unto parch earth and green valleys
Growing muddy and putrefying
Ever decaying ever stinking ever polluting ever stagnating
Becoming clear lucid pure sparkling happy invigorating refreshing
Gravitating from frigidity coldness coolness to comfort warmth hotness incontinent heat
Exploding particulate matter into flotsam and jetsam
Exposing arrogance aloofness stupidity affection flippancy irrationality
Bringing peace satisfaction power convenience temporality
Surrendering solace fulfillment tranquility transcendence essence
Experimenting with fear hate envy lust greed deceit pleasure courage happiness music
Searching for valor love hope beauty charity faith kindness caring
Creating chaos by raging abandoning destroying disfiguring lying distorting scarring killing
Inundating indiscriminately presumptively
Ever singing ever praising ever soothing ever titillating ever mesmerizing ever enticing ever fantasizing ever duping ever using ever toying
Offering to play pray sport escape entertain travel dream nourish know see think feel
Making love laughter music war hate peace tomorrow
Causing growth atrophy health debility inspiration apathy discovery disillusionment
Establishing order by producing reproducing transforming transplanting transmutating transmigrating transmitting transmogrifying
Ever balancing every imbalancing ever taking ever giving
Emulsifying demulsifying foaming defoaming coagulating dispersing scaling softening corroding electroplating sequestering precipitating hurting helping killing saving losing winning hating loving bombing building destroying remaking upsetting stabilizing confusing elucidating excoriating nurturing acidizing neutralizing beginning ending coloring discoloring oxidizing reducing liquefying solidifying catabolizing fermenting
Influent to
Effluent from
Nunc fluens of time
Tota simul of eternity
Being born existing living dying
Being buried
Eon after eon after eon
Without a rhyme to or reason for
Without a known fons et origo or a fathomable terminus
With only a promised PROMISE promised
Transporting this fragile tissue hope mankind by a swift noiseless pulling mysterious gentle ceaseless subtle mighty treacherous conflicting fascinating sweeping force
With an IRRESISTBE CURRENT
Carrying all to a SEA OF LIGHT or a SEA OF DOUBT.
JRF
Friday, December 19, 2008
THE FALLACY OF REASON!
THE FALLACY OF REASON
© December 19, 2008
“We think so because other people all think so, or because, after all, we do think so; or because we were told so and think we must think so; or because we once thought so, and think we still think so; or because, having thought so, we think we will think so. “
Henry Sidgwick (1838 – 1900), English philosopher
* * * * * *
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
I am copying a piece I think might interest you. I think this guy does a fairly eloquent if sometimes passionate job of expressing his side of the issue, and I agree with several of his points.
My wife and I have had at least a dozen Fords over the last few decades, and they’ve all been great. They have been really good values to us.
Up until the last gas crunch, the market wanted SUVs and that’s what they built. Even after the gas crunch, I remain with the bigger vehicle because it’s a safety issue for me (safety for my wife and daughter). Engineering can optimize safety of small cars to a point, but make still matters. Even at $10 per gallon, I’ll keep them and cut somewhere else.
Alan Mulally came up through Boeing, and was actually my customer at one point. I can vouch for his savvy as a businessman, and the choice between him and a politician running any company is for me, a no-brainer. In fact, given the Senatorial appointment processes underway in New York and Illinois, I told my wife this morning, “we might as well just send SpongeBob (a local radio disc jockey of the most obnoxious kind: JRF) to Washington, DC and be done with it.
Be good.
E
E’s REFERENCE: Letter-to-the-editor from a Ford Dealer (edited with comments by me: JRF)
To the Editor:
As I watch the coverage of the fate of the US auto industry, one alarming frustrating fact hits me right between the eyes. The fate of our nation’s economic survival is in the hands of some Congressmen who are completely out of touch and act without knowledge of an industry that affects almost every person in our nation (so was the view of the horse and buggy industry when we went from it to automobiles one hundred years ago: JRF).
Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama has doomed the industry, calling it a dinosaur. No, Mr. Shelby, you are the dinosaur with ideas stuck in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. You and the uninformed journalists and senators hold unto myths that are not relevant in today’s world.
When you say that the BIG THREE build vehicles nobody wants to buy, you must have overlooked GM outsold Toyota by about 1.2 million vehicles in the US and Ford outsold Honda by 850,000 and Nissan by 1.2 million in the US. GM was the world’s Number One automaker beating Toyota by 3,000 units.
When you claim inferior quality comes from the BIG THREE, did you realize Chevy makes the Malibu and Ford makes the Fusion, both rated over Toyota’s Camry? Consumer Report rated Ford on par with good Japanese automakers.
Did you realize BIG THREE’s gas-guzzlers include 33 mpg Malibu that beats the Accord? For ’09 Ford introduces the Hybrid Fusion whose 39 mpg is the best midsize, beating the Camry Hybrid?
When you ask how many times are we going to bail them out, you must be referring to 1980 (actually, it was 1979: JRF). The only BIG THREE bailout was Chrysler, who paid back $1 billion, plus interest (which is true: JRF).
Regarding pickups, perhaps it bothers you that 31 straight yeas Ford’s F-Series has been the best selling vehicle. Ford and GM have dominated this market, and when you see the new ’09 F-150 you’ll agree this won’t change.
Did you realize both GM and Ford offer more hybrid models than Nissan or Honda? Between 2005 and 2007, Ford has invested more than $22 billion in R&D such as Eco Boost, flex fuel, clean diesel, hybrids, plug in hybrids and hydrogen cars.
Perhaps Senator Shelby isn’t really that blind. Maybe he realizes the quality shift to American. Maybe it’s the fact that his state of Alabama has given so much to land factories (for foreign automakers) that he is more concerned about their continued growth than he is about the people of our country.
Senator Shelby’s disdain for “government subsidies” is very hypocritical. In the early ‘90s, he was the driving force behind a $253 million incentive package to Mercedes. While the bridge loan the BIG THREE is requesting will be paid back, Alabama’s $180,000 plus per job was pure incentive.
Senator Shelby, not only are you out of touch, you are a self-serving hypocrite, who is prepared to ruin our nation because of lack of knowledge and lack of due diligence in making your opinions and decisions (such hyperbole dilutes his argument: JRF).
We live in a world of free trade; world economy and we have not been able to produce products as cost effectively. While the governments of other auto producing nations subsidize their automakers, our government may be ready to force its demise.
While our automakers have paid union wages, benefits and legacy debt (average wage for BIG THREE autoworker is $55 per hour including benefits: JRF), our Asian competitors employ cheap labor (these autoworkers earn $45 including benefits in the US, hardly "cheap": JRF). We are at an extreme disadvantage in production costs (true, each car rolling off the assembly line costs on average $1,500 more than the same vehicle on an Asian assembly line in the US because of autoworker legacy costs and worker benefits: JRF).
Some point the blame to corporate management. I would like to speak of Ford Motor Company. The company has streamlined by reducing our workforce by 51,000 since 2005. Closing 17 plants and cutting expenses. Product and future product are excellent and the company is focused on one Ford. Quality and corporate management have improved light years since the nightmare of Jacques Nasser. Thank you Alan Mulally and the best auto company management team in business.
As a Ford dealer, I feel our portion of the $25 billion will never be touched and is not necessary (Ford is not asking for a bailout but a bridge loan of $9 billion that it plans not to touch unless necessary: JRF). Ford currently has $29 billion in liquidity.
The effect of a bankruptcy by GM would hurt the suppliers we all do business with. A Chapter 11 bankruptcy by any manufacturer would cost retirees their health care and retirements (not true; future retirees, yes, but not current status retirees: JRF).
Chances are GM will recover from Chapter 11 with a better business plan with much less expense (that is the plan, past history is problematical suggesting otherwise: JRF). So, who foots the bill if GM or all three go Chapter 11? All that extra health care, unemployment, loss of tax base and some forgiven debt goes back to the taxpayer, us (now who is using scare tactics; also not completely true; obviously there would be a correction of some economic discomfort, but those automotive business that would rise like a Sphinx from the ashes of the BIG THREE would be leaner, meaner, and more competitive: JRF).
Before you, Mr. And Mrs. Journalist continue to misinform the American public (investigative journalist, a dying breed as newspapers and trade journals are also dying, have had an exemplary history of informing, not misinforming: JRF) and turn them against one of the great industries that helped build this nation (but which has been coasting for forty years: JRF), I must ask you one question: before you (Congressmen and Congress women) vote to end health care and retirement benefits for one million retirees (not true, there is no intention in any bill proposed to do this: JRF), eliminate 2.5 million of our nation’s jobs (if Congress and the president wanted to preserve these jobs against the reality of the times, it couldn’t: JRF), lose the technology that will lead us in the future (it is not technology that has failed but those who control that technology who have; how will that change: JRF), I ask this question, have you driven a Ford lately?
Ford Dealer
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
E,
President-elect Barak Obama might wish he were a chicken farmer after a month in the White House. His campaign slogan was correct, this is a transformational age of change. The only problem is what we know and expect we want to remain the same; what effects everyone else we want to see changed.
I sense the passion of this writer to whom you refer, but not the logic of his argument. He is angry, emotional, and collects his facts to cajole and scare the reader who likely does not have the same access to his data, although it is readily available.
We are creatures of impulse, emotions and of actions based on these emotions rather than reason. Reason is a late development. Most of us in fact get along admirably well in our daily life without it.
Now, when it comes to the automobile, which is a little like the Catholic Church in Galileo’s time seeing the earth as the center of the universe, the BIG THREE see themselves as the center of American industry and business, when this is a fallacy of reason. Detroit is a dying manufacturing state, and the car industry there is dying with it.
William Saroyan once wrote a short story (“My Name is Ahab”) about a boy who believed because he was American he could drive an automobile. It was natural to a five-year-old as it was in his genes. Most American men have such a love affair with these machines that it is impossible for flesh and blood women to compete. Most women give up and play second fiddle to steel, glass and plastic. Alas, the automobile is a phallic symbol and the bigger it is the more virile the driver of it feels himself to be. It is, of course, a myth like size in all myths has proven, yet myths persist another fallacy of reason.
The automotive industry is, in fact, a dinosaur. By that I mean its greatest days are behind not ahead of it. Mass transit, or some form of conveyance is going to replace these billions of little steel buckets puffing away across the globe.
I drive a 2000 Taurus. BB drives a 2004 Toyota Camry. She will be getting a new one in 2009. We have not had one problem with any of our Toyotas since returning to the States from Brussels in 1989. We take all our trips in BB’s Camry, the last trip to Minnesota in September 2008, driving over 3,600 miles and getting, on average, 35 mpg, but sometimes paying $4 per gallon and never less than $3.74.
Neither of us is what you could call “in love with cars,” as we have always purchased them in terms of economics and durability. We are, however, both pack rats and record keepers of virtually everything we do. Toyota, over the years or since the late 1980s, has lived up to its reputation with never a problem during that period.
I was out and about today listening to NPR radio. A GM tool and die maker was being interviewed. He was a credit to himself, a credit to his company, a credit to his coworkers, whom he described as honorable and conscientious workers, and a credit to his industry. When the interviewer thanked him for the interview, he answered, "I have been honored."
Now, that is an impossible situation to assault and yet I will. You see this fine man is not the problem. It is the system. He is in a dying system, and even if it corrects itself, its glory days are behind it.
Yes, Ford makes quality cars. In 1990, I made a trip to the International Headquarters of Ford in Dearborn, Michigan for Honeywell. I spent the day interviewing executives, union officials, workers, security personnel, and my counterpart, a man who is something of a legend in the discipline of organization development (OD).
My report of that trip was long and comprehensive. I sent Ford's OD consultant a copy to which he was stunned, writing. "You never took notes. Did you have a recorder?"
I replied with a short note: "No, I didn't take notes, but yes, I had a recorder. It was my brain. It needed no accessory equipment." I never heard from him again.
This is not the first time, incidentally, that a person after the fact wondered if I was doing something surreptitiously. I have trained myself since a salesman early in my career to take extensive notes after a call. At that point, I think I have close to verbatim total recall, yes, as if I had a recorder. I have my mother’s memory.
This OD psychologist went across the globe where Ford made and sold cars, gave infomercials, collected psychometrics, and promoted "The Ford's Resurrection." Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and other publications carried the story of Ford's revival after a recession in the mid-1980s. I mentioned in my 1990 report that rising from the dead was apparently a common occurrence at Ford.
All the signs were up for Ford, then, but one, which has haunted the company since, trust.
It is that terrible word, TRUST. Once trust is broken, in a marriage, in a friendship, by a car manufacturer, or by an investment broker, it takes a long time to get that trust back, and it is never the same trust again. The hubris of the BIG THREE killed that trust a long time ago, and they continue to pay for it to this day.
No question, the BIG THREE make quality automobiles, but with the same rationale that you use, which I can understand: SAFETY. My own daughter drives one of those SUV's that costs as much as some homes, and gets about 8 mpg, and she likes the protection of the tank, too, just like you do.
I respect your view, and hers as well, but SUVs, too, are dinosaurs.
On the BBC news tonight, a reporter interviewed a Chrysler worker, who was not so nice as the young man mentioned earlier that NPR interviewed. This Chrysler worker is to be laid off a month or through January 2009 as Chrysler is shutting down production.
This worker was complaining about having a family, putting food on the table, and being able to survive without a full paycheck. Asked how much he will receive, he said, "Only 80 percent of my regular paycheck."
At $55/hr (including benefits) reduced by 20 percent he will only be receiving $44/hr or $528 a day, or $2,640 per week, or $10,560 (including benefits) to make ends meet during his month of forced leisure. Remember, some hourly workers make as much as $74/hr (including benefits).
I'm sorry. This guy doesn't have a clue as to what is going on around him in this recession. If that BBC audience actually understood the extent of this worker's sacrifice, the shock might have produced more anger than sympathy.
Besides, the argument about how many more units the BIG THREE have sold compared to these foreign car manufacturers, well, the BIG THREE have been in business in this country for a hundred years. Asian car producers have been in business here since the 1970s. Come on now!
No, I think this man who esteems the Ford CEO Mulally so flatteringly is thinking mush, even more so when he attempts to defend the industry.
Automakers went to sleep at the switch and now suffers unintended consequences, consequences that will not go away. There is good reason to have serious doubt that a bailout would not be mismanaged as the automotive industry has not led but followed trends for forty years. It has ignored its own technology when it could produce a vehicle getting 80 mpg. I have no more faith in CEO Mulally, fine a man as he might be, than any of the others, as the aerospace industry in which he worked for Boeing has fallen prey to similar pitfalls.
The marketing scheme of car manufacturers has been like two adolescents out gaming each other. One wants to please and profit from the pleasing the other loves the suspense created by changing its pleasure.
NPR radio told of a car dealership that loaded its lot with hybrids when gas was $4/gal. Now that gasoline is closer to $1.60/gal, it has to eat the steel, as no one wants to buy hybrids. Guess what? The dealer has paid for all of these hybrids. Detroit is not out a dime.
Irrational truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors. This comes to mind as I ponder this "letter-to-the-editor." I confess to having little sympathy and much anger for the lack of leadership in this industry. In fact, I’ve written several books on what I am saying here, commencing with WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS in 1990. I feel a bit like Nostradamus, and it is not a comfortable feeling at all.
And yes, there will be a correction, a necessary correction, and many of those auto dealers will become showrooms for other businesses, many of those still existing manufacturing plants will close and become eyesores to match those already in the graveyard of changing times.
We went through similar trauma when the automobile replaced the horse and buggy. For thousands of years horses had been the way to go; automobiles have been so but for a hundred years. Whether buggies or royal coaches, whether pulling trolleys in the cities, or plows on the farms, people identified with horses with a record of success and, yes, emotionally, too.
Think of all the people who supplied horses with harnesses, saddles, horseshoes, buggies, and oats as well. All the industries allied to horses dried up with the automobile. There was no compassionate government then to step in and assuage their economic demise. Who would have thought a hundred years later the automobile industry would experience a similar crisis.
Society is moving on, and away from Detroit, away from little steel buggies. Sorry, but I don't see it any other way.
Be always well,
Jim
© December 19, 2008
“We think so because other people all think so, or because, after all, we do think so; or because we were told so and think we must think so; or because we once thought so, and think we still think so; or because, having thought so, we think we will think so. “
Henry Sidgwick (1838 – 1900), English philosopher
* * * * * *
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
I am copying a piece I think might interest you. I think this guy does a fairly eloquent if sometimes passionate job of expressing his side of the issue, and I agree with several of his points.
My wife and I have had at least a dozen Fords over the last few decades, and they’ve all been great. They have been really good values to us.
Up until the last gas crunch, the market wanted SUVs and that’s what they built. Even after the gas crunch, I remain with the bigger vehicle because it’s a safety issue for me (safety for my wife and daughter). Engineering can optimize safety of small cars to a point, but make still matters. Even at $10 per gallon, I’ll keep them and cut somewhere else.
Alan Mulally came up through Boeing, and was actually my customer at one point. I can vouch for his savvy as a businessman, and the choice between him and a politician running any company is for me, a no-brainer. In fact, given the Senatorial appointment processes underway in New York and Illinois, I told my wife this morning, “we might as well just send SpongeBob (a local radio disc jockey of the most obnoxious kind: JRF) to Washington, DC and be done with it.
Be good.
E
E’s REFERENCE: Letter-to-the-editor from a Ford Dealer (edited with comments by me: JRF)
To the Editor:
As I watch the coverage of the fate of the US auto industry, one alarming frustrating fact hits me right between the eyes. The fate of our nation’s economic survival is in the hands of some Congressmen who are completely out of touch and act without knowledge of an industry that affects almost every person in our nation (so was the view of the horse and buggy industry when we went from it to automobiles one hundred years ago: JRF).
Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama has doomed the industry, calling it a dinosaur. No, Mr. Shelby, you are the dinosaur with ideas stuck in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. You and the uninformed journalists and senators hold unto myths that are not relevant in today’s world.
When you say that the BIG THREE build vehicles nobody wants to buy, you must have overlooked GM outsold Toyota by about 1.2 million vehicles in the US and Ford outsold Honda by 850,000 and Nissan by 1.2 million in the US. GM was the world’s Number One automaker beating Toyota by 3,000 units.
When you claim inferior quality comes from the BIG THREE, did you realize Chevy makes the Malibu and Ford makes the Fusion, both rated over Toyota’s Camry? Consumer Report rated Ford on par with good Japanese automakers.
Did you realize BIG THREE’s gas-guzzlers include 33 mpg Malibu that beats the Accord? For ’09 Ford introduces the Hybrid Fusion whose 39 mpg is the best midsize, beating the Camry Hybrid?
When you ask how many times are we going to bail them out, you must be referring to 1980 (actually, it was 1979: JRF). The only BIG THREE bailout was Chrysler, who paid back $1 billion, plus interest (which is true: JRF).
Regarding pickups, perhaps it bothers you that 31 straight yeas Ford’s F-Series has been the best selling vehicle. Ford and GM have dominated this market, and when you see the new ’09 F-150 you’ll agree this won’t change.
Did you realize both GM and Ford offer more hybrid models than Nissan or Honda? Between 2005 and 2007, Ford has invested more than $22 billion in R&D such as Eco Boost, flex fuel, clean diesel, hybrids, plug in hybrids and hydrogen cars.
Perhaps Senator Shelby isn’t really that blind. Maybe he realizes the quality shift to American. Maybe it’s the fact that his state of Alabama has given so much to land factories (for foreign automakers) that he is more concerned about their continued growth than he is about the people of our country.
Senator Shelby’s disdain for “government subsidies” is very hypocritical. In the early ‘90s, he was the driving force behind a $253 million incentive package to Mercedes. While the bridge loan the BIG THREE is requesting will be paid back, Alabama’s $180,000 plus per job was pure incentive.
Senator Shelby, not only are you out of touch, you are a self-serving hypocrite, who is prepared to ruin our nation because of lack of knowledge and lack of due diligence in making your opinions and decisions (such hyperbole dilutes his argument: JRF).
We live in a world of free trade; world economy and we have not been able to produce products as cost effectively. While the governments of other auto producing nations subsidize their automakers, our government may be ready to force its demise.
While our automakers have paid union wages, benefits and legacy debt (average wage for BIG THREE autoworker is $55 per hour including benefits: JRF), our Asian competitors employ cheap labor (these autoworkers earn $45 including benefits in the US, hardly "cheap": JRF). We are at an extreme disadvantage in production costs (true, each car rolling off the assembly line costs on average $1,500 more than the same vehicle on an Asian assembly line in the US because of autoworker legacy costs and worker benefits: JRF).
Some point the blame to corporate management. I would like to speak of Ford Motor Company. The company has streamlined by reducing our workforce by 51,000 since 2005. Closing 17 plants and cutting expenses. Product and future product are excellent and the company is focused on one Ford. Quality and corporate management have improved light years since the nightmare of Jacques Nasser. Thank you Alan Mulally and the best auto company management team in business.
As a Ford dealer, I feel our portion of the $25 billion will never be touched and is not necessary (Ford is not asking for a bailout but a bridge loan of $9 billion that it plans not to touch unless necessary: JRF). Ford currently has $29 billion in liquidity.
The effect of a bankruptcy by GM would hurt the suppliers we all do business with. A Chapter 11 bankruptcy by any manufacturer would cost retirees their health care and retirements (not true; future retirees, yes, but not current status retirees: JRF).
Chances are GM will recover from Chapter 11 with a better business plan with much less expense (that is the plan, past history is problematical suggesting otherwise: JRF). So, who foots the bill if GM or all three go Chapter 11? All that extra health care, unemployment, loss of tax base and some forgiven debt goes back to the taxpayer, us (now who is using scare tactics; also not completely true; obviously there would be a correction of some economic discomfort, but those automotive business that would rise like a Sphinx from the ashes of the BIG THREE would be leaner, meaner, and more competitive: JRF).
Before you, Mr. And Mrs. Journalist continue to misinform the American public (investigative journalist, a dying breed as newspapers and trade journals are also dying, have had an exemplary history of informing, not misinforming: JRF) and turn them against one of the great industries that helped build this nation (but which has been coasting for forty years: JRF), I must ask you one question: before you (Congressmen and Congress women) vote to end health care and retirement benefits for one million retirees (not true, there is no intention in any bill proposed to do this: JRF), eliminate 2.5 million of our nation’s jobs (if Congress and the president wanted to preserve these jobs against the reality of the times, it couldn’t: JRF), lose the technology that will lead us in the future (it is not technology that has failed but those who control that technology who have; how will that change: JRF), I ask this question, have you driven a Ford lately?
Ford Dealer
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
E,
President-elect Barak Obama might wish he were a chicken farmer after a month in the White House. His campaign slogan was correct, this is a transformational age of change. The only problem is what we know and expect we want to remain the same; what effects everyone else we want to see changed.
I sense the passion of this writer to whom you refer, but not the logic of his argument. He is angry, emotional, and collects his facts to cajole and scare the reader who likely does not have the same access to his data, although it is readily available.
We are creatures of impulse, emotions and of actions based on these emotions rather than reason. Reason is a late development. Most of us in fact get along admirably well in our daily life without it.
Now, when it comes to the automobile, which is a little like the Catholic Church in Galileo’s time seeing the earth as the center of the universe, the BIG THREE see themselves as the center of American industry and business, when this is a fallacy of reason. Detroit is a dying manufacturing state, and the car industry there is dying with it.
William Saroyan once wrote a short story (“My Name is Ahab”) about a boy who believed because he was American he could drive an automobile. It was natural to a five-year-old as it was in his genes. Most American men have such a love affair with these machines that it is impossible for flesh and blood women to compete. Most women give up and play second fiddle to steel, glass and plastic. Alas, the automobile is a phallic symbol and the bigger it is the more virile the driver of it feels himself to be. It is, of course, a myth like size in all myths has proven, yet myths persist another fallacy of reason.
The automotive industry is, in fact, a dinosaur. By that I mean its greatest days are behind not ahead of it. Mass transit, or some form of conveyance is going to replace these billions of little steel buckets puffing away across the globe.
I drive a 2000 Taurus. BB drives a 2004 Toyota Camry. She will be getting a new one in 2009. We have not had one problem with any of our Toyotas since returning to the States from Brussels in 1989. We take all our trips in BB’s Camry, the last trip to Minnesota in September 2008, driving over 3,600 miles and getting, on average, 35 mpg, but sometimes paying $4 per gallon and never less than $3.74.
Neither of us is what you could call “in love with cars,” as we have always purchased them in terms of economics and durability. We are, however, both pack rats and record keepers of virtually everything we do. Toyota, over the years or since the late 1980s, has lived up to its reputation with never a problem during that period.
I was out and about today listening to NPR radio. A GM tool and die maker was being interviewed. He was a credit to himself, a credit to his company, a credit to his coworkers, whom he described as honorable and conscientious workers, and a credit to his industry. When the interviewer thanked him for the interview, he answered, "I have been honored."
Now, that is an impossible situation to assault and yet I will. You see this fine man is not the problem. It is the system. He is in a dying system, and even if it corrects itself, its glory days are behind it.
Yes, Ford makes quality cars. In 1990, I made a trip to the International Headquarters of Ford in Dearborn, Michigan for Honeywell. I spent the day interviewing executives, union officials, workers, security personnel, and my counterpart, a man who is something of a legend in the discipline of organization development (OD).
My report of that trip was long and comprehensive. I sent Ford's OD consultant a copy to which he was stunned, writing. "You never took notes. Did you have a recorder?"
I replied with a short note: "No, I didn't take notes, but yes, I had a recorder. It was my brain. It needed no accessory equipment." I never heard from him again.
This is not the first time, incidentally, that a person after the fact wondered if I was doing something surreptitiously. I have trained myself since a salesman early in my career to take extensive notes after a call. At that point, I think I have close to verbatim total recall, yes, as if I had a recorder. I have my mother’s memory.
This OD psychologist went across the globe where Ford made and sold cars, gave infomercials, collected psychometrics, and promoted "The Ford's Resurrection." Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and other publications carried the story of Ford's revival after a recession in the mid-1980s. I mentioned in my 1990 report that rising from the dead was apparently a common occurrence at Ford.
All the signs were up for Ford, then, but one, which has haunted the company since, trust.
It is that terrible word, TRUST. Once trust is broken, in a marriage, in a friendship, by a car manufacturer, or by an investment broker, it takes a long time to get that trust back, and it is never the same trust again. The hubris of the BIG THREE killed that trust a long time ago, and they continue to pay for it to this day.
No question, the BIG THREE make quality automobiles, but with the same rationale that you use, which I can understand: SAFETY. My own daughter drives one of those SUV's that costs as much as some homes, and gets about 8 mpg, and she likes the protection of the tank, too, just like you do.
I respect your view, and hers as well, but SUVs, too, are dinosaurs.
On the BBC news tonight, a reporter interviewed a Chrysler worker, who was not so nice as the young man mentioned earlier that NPR interviewed. This Chrysler worker is to be laid off a month or through January 2009 as Chrysler is shutting down production.
This worker was complaining about having a family, putting food on the table, and being able to survive without a full paycheck. Asked how much he will receive, he said, "Only 80 percent of my regular paycheck."
At $55/hr (including benefits) reduced by 20 percent he will only be receiving $44/hr or $528 a day, or $2,640 per week, or $10,560 (including benefits) to make ends meet during his month of forced leisure. Remember, some hourly workers make as much as $74/hr (including benefits).
I'm sorry. This guy doesn't have a clue as to what is going on around him in this recession. If that BBC audience actually understood the extent of this worker's sacrifice, the shock might have produced more anger than sympathy.
Besides, the argument about how many more units the BIG THREE have sold compared to these foreign car manufacturers, well, the BIG THREE have been in business in this country for a hundred years. Asian car producers have been in business here since the 1970s. Come on now!
No, I think this man who esteems the Ford CEO Mulally so flatteringly is thinking mush, even more so when he attempts to defend the industry.
Automakers went to sleep at the switch and now suffers unintended consequences, consequences that will not go away. There is good reason to have serious doubt that a bailout would not be mismanaged as the automotive industry has not led but followed trends for forty years. It has ignored its own technology when it could produce a vehicle getting 80 mpg. I have no more faith in CEO Mulally, fine a man as he might be, than any of the others, as the aerospace industry in which he worked for Boeing has fallen prey to similar pitfalls.
The marketing scheme of car manufacturers has been like two adolescents out gaming each other. One wants to please and profit from the pleasing the other loves the suspense created by changing its pleasure.
NPR radio told of a car dealership that loaded its lot with hybrids when gas was $4/gal. Now that gasoline is closer to $1.60/gal, it has to eat the steel, as no one wants to buy hybrids. Guess what? The dealer has paid for all of these hybrids. Detroit is not out a dime.
Irrational truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors. This comes to mind as I ponder this "letter-to-the-editor." I confess to having little sympathy and much anger for the lack of leadership in this industry. In fact, I’ve written several books on what I am saying here, commencing with WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS in 1990. I feel a bit like Nostradamus, and it is not a comfortable feeling at all.
And yes, there will be a correction, a necessary correction, and many of those auto dealers will become showrooms for other businesses, many of those still existing manufacturing plants will close and become eyesores to match those already in the graveyard of changing times.
We went through similar trauma when the automobile replaced the horse and buggy. For thousands of years horses had been the way to go; automobiles have been so but for a hundred years. Whether buggies or royal coaches, whether pulling trolleys in the cities, or plows on the farms, people identified with horses with a record of success and, yes, emotionally, too.
Think of all the people who supplied horses with harnesses, saddles, horseshoes, buggies, and oats as well. All the industries allied to horses dried up with the automobile. There was no compassionate government then to step in and assuage their economic demise. Who would have thought a hundred years later the automobile industry would experience a similar crisis.
Society is moving on, and away from Detroit, away from little steel buggies. Sorry, but I don't see it any other way.
Be always well,
Jim
Thursday, December 18, 2008
BIG THREE AUTOMAKERS IN THE AGE OF THE SURREAL!
BIG THREE AUTOMAKERS IN THE AGE OF THE SURREAL!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 18, 2008
“While Detroit’s Big Three are laying off thousands of workers, Toyota is hiring thousands of workers right here in America, where a substantial share of all our Toyotas are manufactured. Will (a bailout) save Detroit or Michigan? No. Detroit and Michigan have followed classic liberal politics of treating businesses as prey, rather than as assets. They have helped kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. So have the unions. So have managements that have gone along to get along. A bailout of Detroit’s BIG THREE would be only the latest in postponements of reality.”
Thomas Sowell, Creators Syndicate columnist, The Tampa Tribune, December 18, 2008
* * * * * *
Charles Wilson, CEO of General Motors in the 1950s was prophetic when he said, “As GM goes so goes America.” He meant it in a positive light. After fifty years of dodging reality and falling comfortably into a surreal existence, the American culture has followed the lead of Detroit and GM, and has gotten fat, sassy and indolent.
In an effort to control everything, it has come to control nothing. It is no accident that Robert McNamara, one of the boy geniuses of Detroit during the 1950 – 1960s, was the architect of the Vietnam War, and we know where that got us.
We also know that Walter Reuther made the United Auto Workers (UAW) a major force not only in the auto industry but also in the Democratic Party in the mid 20th century. He treated the auto industry as prey and fought for major concessions to the BIG THREE automakers, while conceding total control of work to these automobile manufacturers.
The UAW model became that of all unions from truck drivers to teachers, from sod carriers to steel workers. The cry was for concessions and entitlements seldom associated with competencies or results.
The pioneers gave birth to countless industries from the late 19th to the early 20th century. This included auto making, radio and telephone communications, public education, railroad building, steel production, coal mining, and vehicular commerce. These forgers into the new century were more often than not autodidactic, self-taught entrepreneurs. They struggled creatively with a changing world brought about by moving from an agrarian to a modern industrial society. By the 1950s, that paradigm was already fading. America commenced the process of coasting on the momentum of the past.
You don't agree? The original science and technological breakthroughs of today's "Electronic Age" were all a product of this earlier period. The late 19th and early 20th century was the most creative period in man's history.
Even the wake up call of the successful launching of the satellite, Sputnik, by the Soviet Union in 1957, or the surge from the East of Total Quality Management of Japan in the 1960s, which cut deeply into manufacturing markets the US thought it owned, failed to get our attention.
That is, until Tom Brokaw of NBCTV chaired an hour-long program in 1980, “Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” American industrial technologists who American industry had rejected were doing miracles in Japan. Suddenly, these obscure men of science and industry -- W. Edwards Deming, J. M. Juran, and Peter Drucker –- were famous and in demand.
Each wake up call was like gnats biting at our ankles, no real threat, just an irritation. We prided ourselves in being an optimistic “can do” society, buying our slogans and catch phrases as reality. It was inconceivable for us to consider that we were a totally reactive society too self-indulgent to see the signs or to anticipate the consequences of inaction in an ever-changing world. We had lost our moral compass and our way.
Reality was no longer inescapable, as it was no longer relevant. We became a nation of apologists from the demands of work to the relevance of education, from the rigors of life to the inevitability of death, from the polarizing influences of the religious right to the atheistic left, from the high achieving elitists to the dumbing down to the lowest common denominator.
It became an anathema to stand out, or to challenge the system. Comfort was giving way to complacency, and independence to courterdependence on the workplace or government for our total well being.
We forgot that to be an individual meant to struggle, to endure pain, to embrace failure so that we might succeed, to take risks and to accept their consequences. It became much more important to fit in than to stand out. We have suffered mightily for this indulgence.
Such apologist as psychologist Nathaniel Branden claimed our malaise was a problem of self-esteem; others pointed out to the disowned self; still others continued the word game with such language as anomie, self-estrangement, alienation, and disassociation. American society became less about doing and more about explaining why we weren’t doing.
Progressive education became a playground of compassionate promotion without learning, as we didn’t want to injure the delicate psyches of our children. Teachers became essentially room monitors while the little lads and lasses were called “Robins” and “Blue Jays” to differentiate the learners from the non-learners.
We couldn’t suggest some kids were very bright and others were not. That was forbidden. If teachers criticized a child, disciplined a child, held a child back for being a non-learner, all hell would break forth for that teacher. So, teachers quit teaching and settled in to being room monitors.
The cry became everyone should be entitled to a college education whether everyone wanted one or not. Meanwhile, we lacked plumbers, pipe fitters, lathe operators, electricians, toolmakers, carpenters and builders, gardeners and landscapers, farmers and farm workers.
Somewhere along the way reality became a bypass as we are not all college material, and if we are not all college material, something must be wrong with us, when nothing is wrong with us at all. We simply have differing talents, interests and capabilities. We don’t have to create an army of one or the other, but a complement of both. That is what enriches society as it is ever changing.
When I was in college, my freshman class of more than 3,000 was reduced to 2,700 by the end of the first semester, and by graduation less than 1,000 of my original classmates were there to graduate. Being a student of a land grant university, every high school graduate was entitled to admission to a state university.
Many found that they didn’t like the atmosphere of college, the self-reliance imposed, the demands of the course work, or, indeed, the sacrifices of typical youthful insouciance. Education was a job in which you didn't get paid. That rankled those who felt life owed them a living.
If you flunked a course, then, you couldn’t take it over to erase the grade. You couldn’t substitute a core requirement for some non-college course, as is the case today, in order to preserve your chances of staying in school and ultimately graduating.
When you graduated then, the degree meant that you could teach, work as an engineer, chemist, accountant, or administrator because you had acquired the basic skills of those respective disciplines. Your employer didn’t have to conduct remedial programs in reading, writing and arithmetic, much less in the disciplines of your degree. For example, as a management & organization development psychologist, I have had engineering superviors tell me engineering graduates couldn't do engineering. Why? Because they were poor readers and writers.
Today, if you can’t read, no problem. If you can’t do simple calculations, no problem! If you can’t write, no problem!
In the surreal world of college education, these competencies are too often irrelevant. You simply have to behave, not provoke your professors, and take substitute courses that are less challenging in these disciplines, all of which are available in droves.
Then too, you can major in feminine studies, or ethnic studies, or some other politically correct major to acquire a meaningless degree. The quest is to become a college graduate, not be educated. Chances are once you have graduated you’ll never read a book or challenge your mind again. If this seems absurd, more than 50 percent of high school graduates are in some form of college, and less than 10 percent claim to book readers.
At the beginning of the 20th century, only about 10 percent of Americans graduated from high school. The curriculum was called “classical,” because it included four years of math, four years of English, four years of language (usually two years of German and two years of French), chemistry, biology, geology, four years of history, four years of literature (separate from English, covering European Literature), and practical skills training such as mechanics, etiquette and social decorum. It was a liberal arts education easily the equivalent of a college degree if not more so today.
The United States of America built its society on this core group of high school educated, and those that went on to college to embrace an even more challenging curriculum. Less than 5 percent of Americans were college degreed at the time of the Great Depression. My uncle Leonard was one of them.
I have written about him in the past. He had to drop out of high school in his freshman year to help support the family when his mother died. He was fourteen. It was 1914. Once WWI was over, he returned to school, now in Iowa City, Iowa where the University of Iowa was located. He completed four years of classical high education, and four years of college simultaneously in order to be eligible for graduate school.
One day his second year German professor at Iowa told him he was the poorest student he had ever had, not knowing he was taking first year German at the same time. My uncle went on to acquire Ph.D.’s in economics and psychology in 1929, just as the Great Crash on Wall Street occurred. He became the model of my life, and whenever I have thought I had it tough, I’ve always thought of him and his struggle.
My uncle was typical of his generation who were builders of the "American Century." Most of them came of age in the first quarter of the 20th century, with the second quarter of that century producing the "lost generation," the third quarter producing the "beat generation," and the last quarter of the 20th century producing the hippies, "x" and "y" generations, allowing American society to more or less coast to its present predicament in the 21st century.
I will close as I began with a quote from Thomas Sowell’s article:
“Can’t do math or science after they (today’s students) are in college? Denounce those courses for their rigidity and insensitivity, and create softer courses that the student can pass to get their degrees. Once they are out in the real world, people with diplomas and degrees – but with no real education – can hit a wall. But by then the day of reckoning has been postponed for 15 or more years. Of course, the reckoning can last the rest of their lives.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 18, 2008
“While Detroit’s Big Three are laying off thousands of workers, Toyota is hiring thousands of workers right here in America, where a substantial share of all our Toyotas are manufactured. Will (a bailout) save Detroit or Michigan? No. Detroit and Michigan have followed classic liberal politics of treating businesses as prey, rather than as assets. They have helped kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. So have the unions. So have managements that have gone along to get along. A bailout of Detroit’s BIG THREE would be only the latest in postponements of reality.”
Thomas Sowell, Creators Syndicate columnist, The Tampa Tribune, December 18, 2008
* * * * * *
Charles Wilson, CEO of General Motors in the 1950s was prophetic when he said, “As GM goes so goes America.” He meant it in a positive light. After fifty years of dodging reality and falling comfortably into a surreal existence, the American culture has followed the lead of Detroit and GM, and has gotten fat, sassy and indolent.
In an effort to control everything, it has come to control nothing. It is no accident that Robert McNamara, one of the boy geniuses of Detroit during the 1950 – 1960s, was the architect of the Vietnam War, and we know where that got us.
We also know that Walter Reuther made the United Auto Workers (UAW) a major force not only in the auto industry but also in the Democratic Party in the mid 20th century. He treated the auto industry as prey and fought for major concessions to the BIG THREE automakers, while conceding total control of work to these automobile manufacturers.
The UAW model became that of all unions from truck drivers to teachers, from sod carriers to steel workers. The cry was for concessions and entitlements seldom associated with competencies or results.
The pioneers gave birth to countless industries from the late 19th to the early 20th century. This included auto making, radio and telephone communications, public education, railroad building, steel production, coal mining, and vehicular commerce. These forgers into the new century were more often than not autodidactic, self-taught entrepreneurs. They struggled creatively with a changing world brought about by moving from an agrarian to a modern industrial society. By the 1950s, that paradigm was already fading. America commenced the process of coasting on the momentum of the past.
You don't agree? The original science and technological breakthroughs of today's "Electronic Age" were all a product of this earlier period. The late 19th and early 20th century was the most creative period in man's history.
Even the wake up call of the successful launching of the satellite, Sputnik, by the Soviet Union in 1957, or the surge from the East of Total Quality Management of Japan in the 1960s, which cut deeply into manufacturing markets the US thought it owned, failed to get our attention.
That is, until Tom Brokaw of NBCTV chaired an hour-long program in 1980, “Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” American industrial technologists who American industry had rejected were doing miracles in Japan. Suddenly, these obscure men of science and industry -- W. Edwards Deming, J. M. Juran, and Peter Drucker –- were famous and in demand.
Each wake up call was like gnats biting at our ankles, no real threat, just an irritation. We prided ourselves in being an optimistic “can do” society, buying our slogans and catch phrases as reality. It was inconceivable for us to consider that we were a totally reactive society too self-indulgent to see the signs or to anticipate the consequences of inaction in an ever-changing world. We had lost our moral compass and our way.
Reality was no longer inescapable, as it was no longer relevant. We became a nation of apologists from the demands of work to the relevance of education, from the rigors of life to the inevitability of death, from the polarizing influences of the religious right to the atheistic left, from the high achieving elitists to the dumbing down to the lowest common denominator.
It became an anathema to stand out, or to challenge the system. Comfort was giving way to complacency, and independence to courterdependence on the workplace or government for our total well being.
We forgot that to be an individual meant to struggle, to endure pain, to embrace failure so that we might succeed, to take risks and to accept their consequences. It became much more important to fit in than to stand out. We have suffered mightily for this indulgence.
Such apologist as psychologist Nathaniel Branden claimed our malaise was a problem of self-esteem; others pointed out to the disowned self; still others continued the word game with such language as anomie, self-estrangement, alienation, and disassociation. American society became less about doing and more about explaining why we weren’t doing.
Progressive education became a playground of compassionate promotion without learning, as we didn’t want to injure the delicate psyches of our children. Teachers became essentially room monitors while the little lads and lasses were called “Robins” and “Blue Jays” to differentiate the learners from the non-learners.
We couldn’t suggest some kids were very bright and others were not. That was forbidden. If teachers criticized a child, disciplined a child, held a child back for being a non-learner, all hell would break forth for that teacher. So, teachers quit teaching and settled in to being room monitors.
The cry became everyone should be entitled to a college education whether everyone wanted one or not. Meanwhile, we lacked plumbers, pipe fitters, lathe operators, electricians, toolmakers, carpenters and builders, gardeners and landscapers, farmers and farm workers.
Somewhere along the way reality became a bypass as we are not all college material, and if we are not all college material, something must be wrong with us, when nothing is wrong with us at all. We simply have differing talents, interests and capabilities. We don’t have to create an army of one or the other, but a complement of both. That is what enriches society as it is ever changing.
When I was in college, my freshman class of more than 3,000 was reduced to 2,700 by the end of the first semester, and by graduation less than 1,000 of my original classmates were there to graduate. Being a student of a land grant university, every high school graduate was entitled to admission to a state university.
Many found that they didn’t like the atmosphere of college, the self-reliance imposed, the demands of the course work, or, indeed, the sacrifices of typical youthful insouciance. Education was a job in which you didn't get paid. That rankled those who felt life owed them a living.
If you flunked a course, then, you couldn’t take it over to erase the grade. You couldn’t substitute a core requirement for some non-college course, as is the case today, in order to preserve your chances of staying in school and ultimately graduating.
When you graduated then, the degree meant that you could teach, work as an engineer, chemist, accountant, or administrator because you had acquired the basic skills of those respective disciplines. Your employer didn’t have to conduct remedial programs in reading, writing and arithmetic, much less in the disciplines of your degree. For example, as a management & organization development psychologist, I have had engineering superviors tell me engineering graduates couldn't do engineering. Why? Because they were poor readers and writers.
Today, if you can’t read, no problem. If you can’t do simple calculations, no problem! If you can’t write, no problem!
In the surreal world of college education, these competencies are too often irrelevant. You simply have to behave, not provoke your professors, and take substitute courses that are less challenging in these disciplines, all of which are available in droves.
Then too, you can major in feminine studies, or ethnic studies, or some other politically correct major to acquire a meaningless degree. The quest is to become a college graduate, not be educated. Chances are once you have graduated you’ll never read a book or challenge your mind again. If this seems absurd, more than 50 percent of high school graduates are in some form of college, and less than 10 percent claim to book readers.
At the beginning of the 20th century, only about 10 percent of Americans graduated from high school. The curriculum was called “classical,” because it included four years of math, four years of English, four years of language (usually two years of German and two years of French), chemistry, biology, geology, four years of history, four years of literature (separate from English, covering European Literature), and practical skills training such as mechanics, etiquette and social decorum. It was a liberal arts education easily the equivalent of a college degree if not more so today.
The United States of America built its society on this core group of high school educated, and those that went on to college to embrace an even more challenging curriculum. Less than 5 percent of Americans were college degreed at the time of the Great Depression. My uncle Leonard was one of them.
I have written about him in the past. He had to drop out of high school in his freshman year to help support the family when his mother died. He was fourteen. It was 1914. Once WWI was over, he returned to school, now in Iowa City, Iowa where the University of Iowa was located. He completed four years of classical high education, and four years of college simultaneously in order to be eligible for graduate school.
One day his second year German professor at Iowa told him he was the poorest student he had ever had, not knowing he was taking first year German at the same time. My uncle went on to acquire Ph.D.’s in economics and psychology in 1929, just as the Great Crash on Wall Street occurred. He became the model of my life, and whenever I have thought I had it tough, I’ve always thought of him and his struggle.
My uncle was typical of his generation who were builders of the "American Century." Most of them came of age in the first quarter of the 20th century, with the second quarter of that century producing the "lost generation," the third quarter producing the "beat generation," and the last quarter of the 20th century producing the hippies, "x" and "y" generations, allowing American society to more or less coast to its present predicament in the 21st century.
I will close as I began with a quote from Thomas Sowell’s article:
“Can’t do math or science after they (today’s students) are in college? Denounce those courses for their rigidity and insensitivity, and create softer courses that the student can pass to get their degrees. Once they are out in the real world, people with diplomas and degrees – but with no real education – can hit a wall. But by then the day of reckoning has been postponed for 15 or more years. Of course, the reckoning can last the rest of their lives.”
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
WHAT ARE YOU LIKE ON THE INSIDE?
WHAT ARE YOU LIKE ON THE INSIDE?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 17, 2008
“Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts; the first and wisest of beasts it may be; but still beasts. We only differ in degree and not in kind; just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of the materialists, we are not of the same kind as beasts; and this also we say from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it must be the possession of a soul within us that makes the difference.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834), English poet and critic
A WRITER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
The Wizard of Oz parodied our cultural need for external verification and validation. As oft watched or read as that story has been, we still don't get the end.
My education was interrupted by lack of funds (and probably interest) and resumed after I had been working for seven or eight years and began to rise in management ranks. (How embarrassing, I hope there are no pictures of me on the company ladder.)
To my amazement, I felt learning was so much easier. It turned out, it wasn't learning but earning grades that was much easier. I mentioned this to one of the professors with whom I had developed a good rapport. Sort of complaining about spending so much money to get a degree while rehashing things I had already learned in the field. True to academia, he pointed out that the degree would legitimize my experience. Ten years later and deja vu in an MBA program.
A long path to make the same point you did. And to reinforce the Wizard of Oz. Even when the knowledge and talent are in you, there to be experienced by anyone willing to take the time to see it, people distrust their own perception and request the legitimizing document.
Now, PhDs are different in terms of depth. I have worked with PhDs and greatly appreciated that type of knowledge. It is very important to discovery and innovation in a particular field.
My preference for true creativity is the person with broad knowledge to medium depths that can bring together varied concepts to create new thought and challenge paradigms. Thanks for being that guy.
Michael
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Your journey and your geography give me an indication of what you are like in the inside. It is common knowledge that I refer to my wife, Betty, as “Beautiful Betty.” It is because her insides match the beauty of her outsides. When you arrive at that junction, you can never be anyone else’s person, ever, but your own.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 17, 2008
“Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts; the first and wisest of beasts it may be; but still beasts. We only differ in degree and not in kind; just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of the materialists, we are not of the same kind as beasts; and this also we say from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it must be the possession of a soul within us that makes the difference.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834), English poet and critic
A WRITER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
The Wizard of Oz parodied our cultural need for external verification and validation. As oft watched or read as that story has been, we still don't get the end.
My education was interrupted by lack of funds (and probably interest) and resumed after I had been working for seven or eight years and began to rise in management ranks. (How embarrassing, I hope there are no pictures of me on the company ladder.)
To my amazement, I felt learning was so much easier. It turned out, it wasn't learning but earning grades that was much easier. I mentioned this to one of the professors with whom I had developed a good rapport. Sort of complaining about spending so much money to get a degree while rehashing things I had already learned in the field. True to academia, he pointed out that the degree would legitimize my experience. Ten years later and deja vu in an MBA program.
A long path to make the same point you did. And to reinforce the Wizard of Oz. Even when the knowledge and talent are in you, there to be experienced by anyone willing to take the time to see it, people distrust their own perception and request the legitimizing document.
Now, PhDs are different in terms of depth. I have worked with PhDs and greatly appreciated that type of knowledge. It is very important to discovery and innovation in a particular field.
My preference for true creativity is the person with broad knowledge to medium depths that can bring together varied concepts to create new thought and challenge paradigms. Thanks for being that guy.
Michael
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Your journey and your geography give me an indication of what you are like in the inside. It is common knowledge that I refer to my wife, Betty, as “Beautiful Betty.” It is because her insides match the beauty of her outsides. When you arrive at that junction, you can never be anyone else’s person, ever, but your own.
Be always well,
Jim
COUTH, CULTURE AND CORRUPTION!
COUTH, CULTURE AND CORRUPTION
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 17, 2008
“Corrupt influence is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality, and of all disorder; it loads us more than millions of debt, takes away vigor from our arms, wisdom from our councils, and every shadow of authority and credit from the most venerable parts of our constitutions.”
Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797), English statesmen
MY GERMAN FRIEND WRITES:
Referring to Henry Ward Beecher:
Why don't we have people wise like him anymore in politics and economy?
Why are we corrupted by greed for money?
Manfred
Note: Manfred was referencing to this quote from my introduction to, "I'm a Fisherologist":
“Ideas are cosmopolitan. They have the liberty of the world. You have no right to take the sword and cross the bounds of other nations, and enforce on them laws or institutions they are unwilling to receive. But there is no limit to the sphere of ideas. Your thoughts and feeling, the whole world lies open to them, and you have the right to send them into my latitude, and to give them sweep around the earth, to the mind of every human being.”
Henry Ward Beecher (1813 – 1887), American clergyman
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Manfred,
Incidentally, Henry Ward Beecher was the younger brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote UNCLE TOM'S CABIN (1852). The other title to this book was LIFE AMONG THE LOWLY.
When President Abraham Lincoln greeted the author at the White House after the start of the Civil War, the six-four Lincoln said to the barely five-foot author, "So you're the little lady responsible for this war."
She was, indeed, by writing this polemical novel of slavery that alerted the nation, mainly the North, to the dire circumstances under which blacks suffered in the South.
I have become increasingly aware of this "nature versus nurture" debate, as I've gotten older. Harriet Beecher Stowe's father was the Reverend Lyman Beecher, a Calvinistic Divine. I have concluded that genetics are crucial but of little consequence if not mobilized by passion and action.
Mrs. Stowe came from a fundamentally righteous home so morality and civic conscience were in her sociobiology (genes). It should therefore come as no surprise that her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, would become a clergyman.
Remarkably, and I know you didn't ask for all this information, a slave escaped to Canada, and wrote a book a few years before the publication of UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, which contained many of the same themes. I find it highly unlikely that Mrs. Stowe was not aware of this work. I think it more likely she knew of this book and read it.
If you have not had an opportunity to read UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, I should forewarn you that it is a sentimental novel of gothic proportions with loads of quotations from the Scripture.
Regarding your point about money and corruption, as I have said elsewhere, I don't think money, per se, is the corrupter -- Freud called money "filthy lucre" -- but the implications of power, status, prestige, respect, security, and social prominence with which money is identified. Herein, lies the conundrum.
Several years ago in a television episode of Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone," a couple happened on a great deal of money, and thought they had achieved all the things mentioned above. Money was the answer to their prayers and they expected to be showered with happiness. Quite the opposite was to be their experience.
The only problem is that they lacked the required social amenity of couth and culture, and were dismally disappointed.
You can't buy couth or culture. You have to either be born into it, or earn it by a passion for it. The nouveau riche know this only too well, as do lottery winners.
Sudden wealth can destroy happiness without the concomitant preparation. It has often caused great trauma in families in the loss of identity and sense of place, as many lucky lottery winners can attest. These winners have encountered jealousy and envy among their own kind, and rejection by those with whom they would seek new identity: a lose-lose proposition. Sad.
More difficult to explain is that of Bernard Madoff, and his Ponzi scheme, bilking the so-called sophisticated community of bankers and investors of $50 billion.
One commentator claims "connections" and "reputation" greased the skids for him, as Madoff had been no less than chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange.
Think of how many times we have ourselves been duped in small ways by not making the person with the information pass through our screen of skepticism. A Nobel Laureate in Physics, for example, may know squad little about life, but he says this or that and we think, "He has a point," when he has no point at all. This goes triple for celebrities, especially the screen film star type because they play a thinker in a film they are one.
I know of someone bilked out of $27,000 in cash by a guy who had a yacht and was supposed "to be rich," and if he was rich, "well, obviously, he could make others rich, too, right?" Wrong, dead wrong to the tune of $27,000.
Madoff was in the social register (Blue Book) and launched his schemes with relative impunity. In fact, the Security & Exchange Commission investigated him in 2004, and came up empty. You can imagine how thorough was the investigation of someone so prominent.
Then I thought of Sir Edmund Hillary when asked why he climbed Mount Everest. He answered, "Because it's there." Maybe, just maybe Madoff did it because he could, not for the money, not for the prestige -- he's infamous now -- but for the excitement, for the feeling of being alive!
Geed is complicated and corruption even more so. People with everything often appear to feel as if having nothing at all. They have lost the pleasure of a morning sunrise or an evening sunset, the moist spank of an ocean breeze against the face like an after shave lotion, the delight of encountering the unsure footsteps of a child with a smile as broad as Sunday, waddling uncertainly across the mall floor towards you, a stranger, and greeting you as if family.
When you lose that, when all life is about more, you are dead inside, and should be pitied not damned.
Merry Christmas!
Always be well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 17, 2008
“Corrupt influence is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality, and of all disorder; it loads us more than millions of debt, takes away vigor from our arms, wisdom from our councils, and every shadow of authority and credit from the most venerable parts of our constitutions.”
Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797), English statesmen
MY GERMAN FRIEND WRITES:
Referring to Henry Ward Beecher:
Why don't we have people wise like him anymore in politics and economy?
Why are we corrupted by greed for money?
Manfred
Note: Manfred was referencing to this quote from my introduction to, "I'm a Fisherologist":
“Ideas are cosmopolitan. They have the liberty of the world. You have no right to take the sword and cross the bounds of other nations, and enforce on them laws or institutions they are unwilling to receive. But there is no limit to the sphere of ideas. Your thoughts and feeling, the whole world lies open to them, and you have the right to send them into my latitude, and to give them sweep around the earth, to the mind of every human being.”
Henry Ward Beecher (1813 – 1887), American clergyman
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Manfred,
Incidentally, Henry Ward Beecher was the younger brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote UNCLE TOM'S CABIN (1852). The other title to this book was LIFE AMONG THE LOWLY.
When President Abraham Lincoln greeted the author at the White House after the start of the Civil War, the six-four Lincoln said to the barely five-foot author, "So you're the little lady responsible for this war."
She was, indeed, by writing this polemical novel of slavery that alerted the nation, mainly the North, to the dire circumstances under which blacks suffered in the South.
I have become increasingly aware of this "nature versus nurture" debate, as I've gotten older. Harriet Beecher Stowe's father was the Reverend Lyman Beecher, a Calvinistic Divine. I have concluded that genetics are crucial but of little consequence if not mobilized by passion and action.
Mrs. Stowe came from a fundamentally righteous home so morality and civic conscience were in her sociobiology (genes). It should therefore come as no surprise that her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, would become a clergyman.
Remarkably, and I know you didn't ask for all this information, a slave escaped to Canada, and wrote a book a few years before the publication of UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, which contained many of the same themes. I find it highly unlikely that Mrs. Stowe was not aware of this work. I think it more likely she knew of this book and read it.
If you have not had an opportunity to read UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, I should forewarn you that it is a sentimental novel of gothic proportions with loads of quotations from the Scripture.
Regarding your point about money and corruption, as I have said elsewhere, I don't think money, per se, is the corrupter -- Freud called money "filthy lucre" -- but the implications of power, status, prestige, respect, security, and social prominence with which money is identified. Herein, lies the conundrum.
Several years ago in a television episode of Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone," a couple happened on a great deal of money, and thought they had achieved all the things mentioned above. Money was the answer to their prayers and they expected to be showered with happiness. Quite the opposite was to be their experience.
The only problem is that they lacked the required social amenity of couth and culture, and were dismally disappointed.
You can't buy couth or culture. You have to either be born into it, or earn it by a passion for it. The nouveau riche know this only too well, as do lottery winners.
Sudden wealth can destroy happiness without the concomitant preparation. It has often caused great trauma in families in the loss of identity and sense of place, as many lucky lottery winners can attest. These winners have encountered jealousy and envy among their own kind, and rejection by those with whom they would seek new identity: a lose-lose proposition. Sad.
More difficult to explain is that of Bernard Madoff, and his Ponzi scheme, bilking the so-called sophisticated community of bankers and investors of $50 billion.
One commentator claims "connections" and "reputation" greased the skids for him, as Madoff had been no less than chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange.
Think of how many times we have ourselves been duped in small ways by not making the person with the information pass through our screen of skepticism. A Nobel Laureate in Physics, for example, may know squad little about life, but he says this or that and we think, "He has a point," when he has no point at all. This goes triple for celebrities, especially the screen film star type because they play a thinker in a film they are one.
I know of someone bilked out of $27,000 in cash by a guy who had a yacht and was supposed "to be rich," and if he was rich, "well, obviously, he could make others rich, too, right?" Wrong, dead wrong to the tune of $27,000.
Madoff was in the social register (Blue Book) and launched his schemes with relative impunity. In fact, the Security & Exchange Commission investigated him in 2004, and came up empty. You can imagine how thorough was the investigation of someone so prominent.
Then I thought of Sir Edmund Hillary when asked why he climbed Mount Everest. He answered, "Because it's there." Maybe, just maybe Madoff did it because he could, not for the money, not for the prestige -- he's infamous now -- but for the excitement, for the feeling of being alive!
Geed is complicated and corruption even more so. People with everything often appear to feel as if having nothing at all. They have lost the pleasure of a morning sunrise or an evening sunset, the moist spank of an ocean breeze against the face like an after shave lotion, the delight of encountering the unsure footsteps of a child with a smile as broad as Sunday, waddling uncertainly across the mall floor towards you, a stranger, and greeting you as if family.
When you lose that, when all life is about more, you are dead inside, and should be pitied not damned.
Merry Christmas!
Always be well,
Jim
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
I'M A FISHEROLOGIST!
I’M A FISHEROLOGIST!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 16, 2008
“Ideas are cosmopolitan. They have the liberty of the world. You have no right to take the sword and cross the bounds of other nations, and enforce on them laws or institutions they are unwilling to receive. But there is no limit to the sphere of ideas. Your thoughts and feeling, the whole world lies open to them, and you have the right to send them into my latitutde, and to give them sweep around the earth, to the mind of every human being.”
Henry Ward Beecher (1813 – 1887), American clergyman
A READER WRITES:
A reader of my blog (www.fisherofideas.com) writes, "I am a psychologist, and you don't write like a psychologist. My brother-in-law is a psychiatrist, and he says you don't write like a psychiatrist. My next-door-neighbor is a professor of sociology at the university here, and he says you don't write like a sociologist. One of my favorite professors was an anthropologist, and he says you don't write like an anthropologist. My minister who majored in theology and philosophy at university says you don't write like a theologian or philosopher, and adds that your 'fragments of a philosophy' are just that, fragments. So, how do you explain yourself?"
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Easy, I answered, I'm a Fisherologist.
The good doctor could have mentioned that I write on statistics and I'm not a statistician. I have on occasion written on the loopholes in mathematics, which are not unlike the loopholes in literature. I am not a mathematician nor am I a professor of literature. In fact, I am not an intellectual or member of the intelligentsia.
But I am a doctor of philosophy, a Ph.D., which the training is meant to imply I have a love of learning, not earning, learning! And yes, learning for learning's sake.
So, I write from the perspective of my training, experience, reading, reflection, wandering and pondering the lessons life has taught me and continues to teach me.
I confess I do write on all the subjects the good doctor mentioned but from a Fisherologist perspective. Additionally, I write on ecology, history, science, urbanology, demographics, engineering, chemistry, religion, mental health, and medicine, to name a few.
Am I qualified to do this? Of course I am. This is the age of the amateur as it was 500 years ago, when priests put aside their priestly duties, and lawyers their adjudication aside to develop what we now call "science."
I am still a living, breathing, thinking man and have a right to my views on this as of everything.
My intentions, often stated (repeatedly in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD), are not to create consensus views. I make no claim to expertise but do state emphatically that I am a critic, sometimes provocatively, and critical examiner of ideas that cross my mind.
My objective in so doing is to stimulate more relevant and appropriate thoughts in the reader regarding the subject I am discussing. In many cases, the reader's mind might tear off in a totally different direction to what I am saying. Often, that has happened to me, so I know something of this hiccup syndrome, and fully approve.
In either case, I am satisfied with the reader.
When people attempt to define you, and there have been far less with me than with a more public and popular figure, they do so to get a bead on you, identify with you, or nullify or neutralize you so they can dispense with you.
A publisher of some of my stuff calls me "a fisher of men." I have been called worse. Whatever it is I think you’ll admit the inclination tells us a lot about ourselves.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 16, 2008
“Ideas are cosmopolitan. They have the liberty of the world. You have no right to take the sword and cross the bounds of other nations, and enforce on them laws or institutions they are unwilling to receive. But there is no limit to the sphere of ideas. Your thoughts and feeling, the whole world lies open to them, and you have the right to send them into my latitutde, and to give them sweep around the earth, to the mind of every human being.”
Henry Ward Beecher (1813 – 1887), American clergyman
A READER WRITES:
A reader of my blog (www.fisherofideas.com) writes, "I am a psychologist, and you don't write like a psychologist. My brother-in-law is a psychiatrist, and he says you don't write like a psychiatrist. My next-door-neighbor is a professor of sociology at the university here, and he says you don't write like a sociologist. One of my favorite professors was an anthropologist, and he says you don't write like an anthropologist. My minister who majored in theology and philosophy at university says you don't write like a theologian or philosopher, and adds that your 'fragments of a philosophy' are just that, fragments. So, how do you explain yourself?"
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Easy, I answered, I'm a Fisherologist.
The good doctor could have mentioned that I write on statistics and I'm not a statistician. I have on occasion written on the loopholes in mathematics, which are not unlike the loopholes in literature. I am not a mathematician nor am I a professor of literature. In fact, I am not an intellectual or member of the intelligentsia.
But I am a doctor of philosophy, a Ph.D., which the training is meant to imply I have a love of learning, not earning, learning! And yes, learning for learning's sake.
So, I write from the perspective of my training, experience, reading, reflection, wandering and pondering the lessons life has taught me and continues to teach me.
I confess I do write on all the subjects the good doctor mentioned but from a Fisherologist perspective. Additionally, I write on ecology, history, science, urbanology, demographics, engineering, chemistry, religion, mental health, and medicine, to name a few.
Am I qualified to do this? Of course I am. This is the age of the amateur as it was 500 years ago, when priests put aside their priestly duties, and lawyers their adjudication aside to develop what we now call "science."
I am still a living, breathing, thinking man and have a right to my views on this as of everything.
My intentions, often stated (repeatedly in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD), are not to create consensus views. I make no claim to expertise but do state emphatically that I am a critic, sometimes provocatively, and critical examiner of ideas that cross my mind.
My objective in so doing is to stimulate more relevant and appropriate thoughts in the reader regarding the subject I am discussing. In many cases, the reader's mind might tear off in a totally different direction to what I am saying. Often, that has happened to me, so I know something of this hiccup syndrome, and fully approve.
In either case, I am satisfied with the reader.
When people attempt to define you, and there have been far less with me than with a more public and popular figure, they do so to get a bead on you, identify with you, or nullify or neutralize you so they can dispense with you.
A publisher of some of my stuff calls me "a fisher of men." I have been called worse. Whatever it is I think you’ll admit the inclination tells us a lot about ourselves.