WHATEVER HAPPENED TO, “I WOULD KNOW!”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 31, 2009
“The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world, is to be in reality what we would appear to be; and if we observe, we shall find, that all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice and experience of them.”
Socrates
* * * * * *
This is meant to end this. Some of you thought I was going to be on the cover of an Executive Excellence publication. That was a vanity myth as it turns out.
As I explained, perhaps not clearly enough, the publisher of that publication, Ken Shelton, published an article of mine I expressly told him not to publish. He took the article off my email address book, which you received as well.
Once the EE issue was published with my contribution in it, I was advised that a dummy issue was going to be created with my picture on the cover as if I had indeed been seen by thousands of readers, when in fact the only ones who would see it would be those on my very slender email address book -- that means you!
I explained this best I could, but someone still wrote, "Hey, Jim, I would not have known the difference. Fact is I'd have thought it was a big deal. Why be so incensed?"
My answer is simple: "I would know!" Whatever happened to that as the final arbiter?
Be always well,
Jim
PS
I've just written a story, "My Favorite Uncle." I am not going to put it on the web or on my email address book. I will mail it to you if I receive an email to the effect that you will not reprint it, send it on to anyone else as I plan to publish it. I will never writer for Executive Excellence again, or anyone else without an agreement signed and dated. The irony is that EE used to operate that way but has gotten sloppy.
A very popular novelist sent three chapters of a proposed book to three friends. It ended up on scores of blogs, and then into some newspapers. This author is one of the few who makes seven-figure income writing. She vows not to publish for the next five years.
You can say how could she be so stupid to send it to friends? The answer is that we writers like to get a sense of how our work resonates with our readers. None of us, not even authors who are millionaires are certain they are making connection with readers.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Thursday, January 29, 2009
LESSONS LEARNED -- AN EXCHANGE!
LESSONS LEARNED – AN EXCHANGE!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 29, 2009
“Who can tell whether learning may not even weaken invention in a man that has great advantages from nature and birth; whether the weight and number of so many men’s thoughts and notions may not suppress his own or hinder the motion and agitation of them, from which all invention arises; as heaping on wood or too many sticks, or too close together suppresses, and sometimes extinguishes a little spark, that would otherwise have grown up to a noble flame.”
Sir William Temple (1628 – 1699), English statesman
* * * * * *
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
The irony of this message is profound for me! You are talking about a publisher who published something of yours without permission. Well, I’m cooling my heels for a week because I had a run in with my company's management. I am devastated and feel wrongly accused. I can appeal my suspension, but have little trust in that process now. Unfortunately, I love my job, my direct boss, but am forced to look for work elsewhere.
As I write this, I am upgrading my resume', job searching via the Internet, a wonderful tool, but it was the title of your piece, LESSONS LEARNED that caught my eye, and this quote in it perked my thoughts:
“There are three things that have dominated my life: honesty, trust and loyalty. I have been told as true as these things are of me that I fail to recognize dishonesty, distrust and disloyalty in others. Not true.”
Perhaps that shoe fits me as well. Are we fools, I ask?
I am. So I take deep breaths, work diligently to refine my skills and put them on paper with a less than joyful knowledge that this is the end of a fine work experience, one that has sadly been corrupted by persons who are less than trustworthy, persons with hidden agendas. I leave with a heavy heart, as I was certain this is where I was meant to be.
My boss is my mentor and he soon will be retiring. I trust him and have confided in him about my anxiety once he leaves. He is like a lame duck president, and can do little as the company shuts the door on me. Am I being railroaded? What do you think? What can I do? What should I do?
I am not naïve. My mind tells me if it didn’t come now, then it would come later. My mind tells me it is time to move on. Thank you for your words. They have come at a very needing time for me. And thank you for listening.
Robert
* * * * * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
In a curious way, I had immediate empathy for you, Robert, in your disclosure.
My mentor, friend and boss was Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth at Honeywell Avionics, Clearwater, Florida. Dr. Pesuth was a brilliant organization/industrial psychologist, and a man who was not uncomfortable with, or intimidated by others of minds of their own. He didn’t compare himself to them or compete against them, but gave them ample room to display their talents and to establish their credibility.
When he hired me, he knew I had had an executive career, written books, and traveled a good part of the world consulting and giving seminars. Unimpressed, he said this in our initial conference: “If you fail to establish rapport with the troops here in the next six weeks, you will be gone.”
It was an “in-your-face reality” check that I must establish my own credentials by doing and by developing my own territorial imperative.
All did not love Dr. Pesuth, but he was loved and respected by me. He was candid, fair, consistent, honest, loyal and trustworthy, something like I would imagine your own direct boss to be.
Yet, when Dr. Pesuth was about to retire, he had me come into his office, and he laid down another piece of reality. “I’ve been running interference for you all these years," he said, "and soon I’ll be gone. The troops love you, but the brass hate and fear you. It appears the vultures are just waiting for my exit to get to you.”
The good doctor was right, but not before I was able to complete a full anatomical appraisal of the complex organization for future analysis and writing. I share this with you, Robert, because LESSONS LEARNED is a lifetime process. We happen to touch common incidental ground in this case. There is however far more to it, as I hope to explain briefly here.
* * * * * *
I am sorry to hear about your situation. Consider it another bump in the road on this journey through life. We cannot change the hearts of those who see us one way and we see ourselves another. If there is one thing life should teach us, and that is that it is not fair nor should we expect it to be.
We have three choices when we run into walls: (1) We can learn from our experience about our situations and about ourselves in these situations; (2) We can break our situations down in terms of our "real self" (as we actually are), or our "ideal self" (as we are expected to be); and then (3) We can take from these insights, and prepare to eat crow, or move on more self-knowing than ever before.
There is another dual battle going on, at the same time, all our lives. It is between our "essence" and our "personality." Our essence is the potential with which we are born or the "true self." Personality is the mask we wear, or our "acquired self." Personality molds us into the person we become.
This is not new as you can see from the seventeenth century quote above from Sir William Temple. We are self-hinderers and that is mainly at the expense of our essence.
Personality is largely influenced by early life experiences, what I call in my writing, "programming."
Our parents, teachers, preachers, peers, and other authority figures contribute to this molding, including the music we listen to, the films we watch, the magazines and newspapers and books we read, the kinds of people we are attracted to, and the early culture that envelopes us.
A hamlet, village, town or city has a culture with a rigid value, belief, and bias code that is intrinsic to the way it conducts day-to-day business, although seldom articulated boldly but experienced subliminally. It is no idle claim that you can take the boy out of the country but not the country out of the boy. None of us sees life as it is. Because of this, we all wear tinted glasses when it comes to reality.
More frequently than not, we are attracted to people and situations that are not good for us, for our self-image or for our growth and development as persons. A corollary to this is that we may be attracted to the right people for us, but they change and move away from our ego ideal.
If so, it is time to leave them as fast as our bodies will allow. This can happen in a job when the culture changes due to new ownership or new management. It can happen when a community changes. And it can happen when a partner changes and is no longer honest, loyal or trustworthy. The point is, if we know ourselves, and know what leavens our spirit to enrichment, and know where we are, doing what we are doing, and realize it is no longer working, scram!
Typically, in our culture, we allow social, economic, political and emotional pressures to keep us in the prison of our ways when our minds tell us otherwise. The most unhappy and bitter people I have on occasion to know are the ones who stayed, claiming that they had no choice.
Our essence, or what we inherit or are born with, is supple and malleable and always available, but our personality can become rigid and brittle and inflexible.
Because of our essence we can keep growing all our lives, doing whatever our essence tells us we would like to do. There is no limit to growth. We often retreat from our essence to fit in, to belong, and to win recognition and appreciation. When we do this, we are increasing our entropy, which is another way of saying, our dying while still alive.
If we are sensible and discerning, we don't stay in jobs that are not reinforcing. We don't stay in relationships that are not self-enhancing. And we don't choose friends that do not increase our sense of self-respect, dignity, self-trust, self-reliance, and self-love.
We cannot love or trust or respect anyone else until we are totally self-accepting of ourselves as we are. Self-love is not self-indulgence. It is liking and respecting ourselves as we are. We are all imperfect human beings but perfectible. If we are self-negating, no matter how optimistic a mask we wear, we are self-imploding. There is no higher forgiveness than forgiving oneself for not being perfect or forgiving oneself when we stumble and take false steps.
Kant once said man is a crooked timber, and I think that pretty well describes us.
Finally, we are programmed from the outside in, but we grow from the inside out.
If you have read me over the years, you know that I have often had to do battle for these things, often taken ten steps back before realizing one step forward. And here is the irony, each time I encountered such a wall I became more self-knowing and able to be a better friend to myself. The most important friend you will ever have in life is yourself. All friendship emanates from that bonding. I hope this helps.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 29, 2009
“Who can tell whether learning may not even weaken invention in a man that has great advantages from nature and birth; whether the weight and number of so many men’s thoughts and notions may not suppress his own or hinder the motion and agitation of them, from which all invention arises; as heaping on wood or too many sticks, or too close together suppresses, and sometimes extinguishes a little spark, that would otherwise have grown up to a noble flame.”
Sir William Temple (1628 – 1699), English statesman
* * * * * *
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
The irony of this message is profound for me! You are talking about a publisher who published something of yours without permission. Well, I’m cooling my heels for a week because I had a run in with my company's management. I am devastated and feel wrongly accused. I can appeal my suspension, but have little trust in that process now. Unfortunately, I love my job, my direct boss, but am forced to look for work elsewhere.
As I write this, I am upgrading my resume', job searching via the Internet, a wonderful tool, but it was the title of your piece, LESSONS LEARNED that caught my eye, and this quote in it perked my thoughts:
“There are three things that have dominated my life: honesty, trust and loyalty. I have been told as true as these things are of me that I fail to recognize dishonesty, distrust and disloyalty in others. Not true.”
Perhaps that shoe fits me as well. Are we fools, I ask?
I am. So I take deep breaths, work diligently to refine my skills and put them on paper with a less than joyful knowledge that this is the end of a fine work experience, one that has sadly been corrupted by persons who are less than trustworthy, persons with hidden agendas. I leave with a heavy heart, as I was certain this is where I was meant to be.
My boss is my mentor and he soon will be retiring. I trust him and have confided in him about my anxiety once he leaves. He is like a lame duck president, and can do little as the company shuts the door on me. Am I being railroaded? What do you think? What can I do? What should I do?
I am not naïve. My mind tells me if it didn’t come now, then it would come later. My mind tells me it is time to move on. Thank you for your words. They have come at a very needing time for me. And thank you for listening.
Robert
* * * * * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
In a curious way, I had immediate empathy for you, Robert, in your disclosure.
My mentor, friend and boss was Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth at Honeywell Avionics, Clearwater, Florida. Dr. Pesuth was a brilliant organization/industrial psychologist, and a man who was not uncomfortable with, or intimidated by others of minds of their own. He didn’t compare himself to them or compete against them, but gave them ample room to display their talents and to establish their credibility.
When he hired me, he knew I had had an executive career, written books, and traveled a good part of the world consulting and giving seminars. Unimpressed, he said this in our initial conference: “If you fail to establish rapport with the troops here in the next six weeks, you will be gone.”
It was an “in-your-face reality” check that I must establish my own credentials by doing and by developing my own territorial imperative.
All did not love Dr. Pesuth, but he was loved and respected by me. He was candid, fair, consistent, honest, loyal and trustworthy, something like I would imagine your own direct boss to be.
Yet, when Dr. Pesuth was about to retire, he had me come into his office, and he laid down another piece of reality. “I’ve been running interference for you all these years," he said, "and soon I’ll be gone. The troops love you, but the brass hate and fear you. It appears the vultures are just waiting for my exit to get to you.”
The good doctor was right, but not before I was able to complete a full anatomical appraisal of the complex organization for future analysis and writing. I share this with you, Robert, because LESSONS LEARNED is a lifetime process. We happen to touch common incidental ground in this case. There is however far more to it, as I hope to explain briefly here.
* * * * * *
I am sorry to hear about your situation. Consider it another bump in the road on this journey through life. We cannot change the hearts of those who see us one way and we see ourselves another. If there is one thing life should teach us, and that is that it is not fair nor should we expect it to be.
We have three choices when we run into walls: (1) We can learn from our experience about our situations and about ourselves in these situations; (2) We can break our situations down in terms of our "real self" (as we actually are), or our "ideal self" (as we are expected to be); and then (3) We can take from these insights, and prepare to eat crow, or move on more self-knowing than ever before.
There is another dual battle going on, at the same time, all our lives. It is between our "essence" and our "personality." Our essence is the potential with which we are born or the "true self." Personality is the mask we wear, or our "acquired self." Personality molds us into the person we become.
This is not new as you can see from the seventeenth century quote above from Sir William Temple. We are self-hinderers and that is mainly at the expense of our essence.
Personality is largely influenced by early life experiences, what I call in my writing, "programming."
Our parents, teachers, preachers, peers, and other authority figures contribute to this molding, including the music we listen to, the films we watch, the magazines and newspapers and books we read, the kinds of people we are attracted to, and the early culture that envelopes us.
A hamlet, village, town or city has a culture with a rigid value, belief, and bias code that is intrinsic to the way it conducts day-to-day business, although seldom articulated boldly but experienced subliminally. It is no idle claim that you can take the boy out of the country but not the country out of the boy. None of us sees life as it is. Because of this, we all wear tinted glasses when it comes to reality.
More frequently than not, we are attracted to people and situations that are not good for us, for our self-image or for our growth and development as persons. A corollary to this is that we may be attracted to the right people for us, but they change and move away from our ego ideal.
If so, it is time to leave them as fast as our bodies will allow. This can happen in a job when the culture changes due to new ownership or new management. It can happen when a community changes. And it can happen when a partner changes and is no longer honest, loyal or trustworthy. The point is, if we know ourselves, and know what leavens our spirit to enrichment, and know where we are, doing what we are doing, and realize it is no longer working, scram!
Typically, in our culture, we allow social, economic, political and emotional pressures to keep us in the prison of our ways when our minds tell us otherwise. The most unhappy and bitter people I have on occasion to know are the ones who stayed, claiming that they had no choice.
Our essence, or what we inherit or are born with, is supple and malleable and always available, but our personality can become rigid and brittle and inflexible.
Because of our essence we can keep growing all our lives, doing whatever our essence tells us we would like to do. There is no limit to growth. We often retreat from our essence to fit in, to belong, and to win recognition and appreciation. When we do this, we are increasing our entropy, which is another way of saying, our dying while still alive.
If we are sensible and discerning, we don't stay in jobs that are not reinforcing. We don't stay in relationships that are not self-enhancing. And we don't choose friends that do not increase our sense of self-respect, dignity, self-trust, self-reliance, and self-love.
We cannot love or trust or respect anyone else until we are totally self-accepting of ourselves as we are. Self-love is not self-indulgence. It is liking and respecting ourselves as we are. We are all imperfect human beings but perfectible. If we are self-negating, no matter how optimistic a mask we wear, we are self-imploding. There is no higher forgiveness than forgiving oneself for not being perfect or forgiving oneself when we stumble and take false steps.
Kant once said man is a crooked timber, and I think that pretty well describes us.
Finally, we are programmed from the outside in, but we grow from the inside out.
If you have read me over the years, you know that I have often had to do battle for these things, often taken ten steps back before realizing one step forward. And here is the irony, each time I encountered such a wall I became more self-knowing and able to be a better friend to myself. The most important friend you will ever have in life is yourself. All friendship emanates from that bonding. I hope this helps.
Be always well,
Jim
Sunday, January 25, 2009
RESPONSE TO A READER ON "CREATIVITY IN A CHANGING WORLD!" -- EXCERPT FROM CONFIDENT THINKING
RESPONSE TO A READER ON “CREATIVITY IN A CHANGING WORLD,” EXCERPT FROM DR. FISHER’S NEW BOOK, “CONFIDENT THINKING”!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 25, 2009
REFERENCE:
This reader created two compelling essays to, “Creativity In A Changing World.” He says in the first, “One thing I enjoy about reading you is your gift to send emotion through your words.” In the second, he has much to say about plagiarism. His comments throughout are thoughtful and reflective. It shows a beautiful mind as you will see when you read his two essays. In A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), I suggest that we are all born wonderers and therefore philosophers. Allan W. Watts captured this sentiment: “A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gapes and stares at what sensible people take for granted, a person who cannot get rid of the feeling that the barest of facts of everyday life are unbelievably odd. Aristotle put it best, the beginning of philosophy is wonder.” Michael is a wonderer and therefore a philosopher. I cherish the connection.
* * * * * *
“It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled, thenceforth, to steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who can entertain it and of him who can adequately place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882), American poet, essayist and philosopher
* * * * * *
“What stubbing, plowing, digging, and barrowing are to land, that thinking, reflecting, examining are to the mind. Each has its proper culture; and as the land that is suffered to lie waste and wild for a long time will be overspread with brushwood, brambles, and thorns, which have neither use nor beauty, so there will not fail to sprout up in a neglected uncultivated mind, a great number of prejudices and absurd opinions, which owe their origin partly to the soil itself, the passions, and imperfections of the mind of man, and partly to those seeds which chance to be scattered in it by every wind of doctrine which the cunning of statesmen, the singularity of pedants, and the superstition of fools shall raise.”
George Berkeley (1685 – 1753), Irish Catholic Bishop and Philosopher
* * * * * *
DR. FISHER’S RESPONSE (The Reader’s Essays follow):
It was Solomon who said there was nothing new under the sun. You are correct in saying that includes the printed word. Plagiarism, as Emerson eludes above, is a touchy subject. I am not a lawyer. I have no training in the law. I know the dictionary definition of plagiarism: “To steel and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own, to use source material without due credit, to commit literary theft. “
Trained as an academic, the basis of Ph.D. scholarship, if you have occasion to read some scholarly journals, you know you can’t get past two words without sources listed. It is confusing and incomprehensible for the reader to make sense of writer’s point. So trained, I can tell you it takes hard work to get beyond this to express something of interest to the general reader. Were it not for the help of BB, I don’t know if I’d have made the turn. She’s not sure I have.
As you may note from the Bishop Berkeley quote above, someone who died in the eighteenth century, I have expressed similar ideas before. Now, you see the connection.
When I made reference to plagiarism, I did so with reference to president Kennedy’s use of “ask not” in his inaugural without giving credit to Kahlil Gibran, who first uttered the phrase forty years before to the Lebanese people.
My thought was that it would have been nice to give a Lebanese man who came to America his due. He wrote many inspiring books, including “The Prophet” (1923) to bridge the Islam with the American world. I believe I have read every one of his published books including his autobiography. I mention this to register my fascination with him. He touched a cord in me as a reader, writer, and citizen of the world.
The azimuth to where I am now from whence I came has encountered many bumps in the road; taken many false steps, stumble upon many surprises, while gaining insights, which have driven me to the printed word. It is always a danger to lift remarks from a body of work and expect them to stand on their own.
As I write, I find this book developing gravitas that wasn’t originally intended. That can happen. I wanted to provoke the reader “to think, to reflect, to examine the mind.” Given the way it is today, when thinking is a luxury, I find us tilling the same fields until they are fallow, and cannot stand by and say nothing.
Michael, my friend, we are stuck. Paul Krugman, a liberal Democrat, expresses this in his New York Times column (January 24, 2009):
“My real problem with the speech (Obama inaugural), on matters economic, was its conventionality. In response to an unprecedented economic crisis – or, more accurately, a crisis whose only real precedence is the Great Depression – Obama did what people in Washington do when they want to sound serious: He spoke in the abstract, of the need to make hard choices and stand up to special interests. That’s not enough. In fact, it’s not even right.”
It is what I call hesitation rhetoric based on critical thinking. My book is opposed to this thinking exclusive to creative thinking because the dog ends up always chasing its own tail.
The other day I told my daughter, a recent college graduate who cannot find a job, that anti-intellectualism is not endemic to the rank & file Americans, alone, but is pervasive in our hallow halls of ivy in academia to the paved streets of the rich and privileged across the land. How so?
I believe it goes back to William James and our pride in pragmatism. James was opposed to his brother Henry’s intellectualism, and said so often in print. Pragmatism is anti-intellectual and American. We take pride in shortcuts to insight to avoid the icy roads, sinkholes, washed out bridges and mudslides of life that still prove unavoidable. It is why self-help books, diet pills, personal trainers and liposuction are so in demand. We’ll do almost anything to avoid thought or action to register change.
President Obama went on to say: “Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week, last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions, that time has surely passed.”
It wasn’t plagiarism, per se, but the famous economist of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes, said practically the same thing then, and only World War II lifted the United States and the world out of the depression.
American workers are congratulated for their industry, productivity and creativity when it has been my experience at virtually all levels of organization that four people are standing around waiting for instructions while the fifth person is taking the initiative and doing most of the work.
As for plagiarism, I read others, as do you, and as they took from those who influenced them, I have taken from them who have influenced me. You are right. There is no originality only a different insight or elaboration on an idea. If you read the quotes ahead of my essays, you will note they give you a sense of what is to follow.
My intention is to provoke the reader to consider reexamining his views on subjects taken for granted. As a mature graduate student, taking all these academic courses, I was continually instructed it wasn’t good scholarship to slide back and forth from the particular to the general, from the individual to society as if a seamless network. I explained to my professors empirically why I was of such a mind. You would have thought I’d spoke heresy. They weren’t used to having a student question their discipline much less its methodology. You can imagine it wasn’t an especially happy courtship, or blissful marriage. Even today, I suspect few academics read me.
That said I would visit the four quadrants of a city, talk to citizens of various occupations, and have a profile of that city’s personality, demographics and geography.
People love a listener, and are uncommonly candid to a stranger. This results in an accurate assessment of how that community thinks, believes, values, and behaves, as well as how it perceives itself.
Joseph Wambaugh, the former Los Angeles Police Department sergeant, and best selling author once said, “A community gets the police it deserves.” Indeed, it does. During the 1970s, I did police consulting from New York City to Miami on the east coast of the United States. My Ph.D. dissertation was based on that work. It was titled “The Police Paradox: Systematic Exploration in the Paradoxical Dilemma of the Police and the Policed” (1978). I found not only did police reflect the behavior of the community, but also the police community reflected the behavior of that wider community it served.
Earlier in my career, when I was a chemical sales engineer for Nalco Chemical Company, steeped in technology, a world of jargon, and a tool kit of impressive laboratory toys, I quickly learned these were of secondary importance to reading the contact accurately. I would note the appearance, tone, temperament and cordiality of the receptionist as an index of what was to follow. I would also study how the reception lobby was laid out and what it was trying to tell me. I would observe how buyers treated other sellers, and whether they were invited to their offices or not. It never occurred to me I was doing a social psychological study, but I was.
It worked for me to such an extent it would change my life. When I was in graduate school, I attempted to share this with my professors, only to be reminded “they had the power of the grade,” and so I left it at that. Yet, my experience tells me:
(1) Everything is connected to everything else;
(2) Everything has to go somewhere to mean something;
(3) Nature knows best and is expressed in our nature; we cannot change that fact.
(4) There is no such thing as a free lunch, free ride, or action without consequences.
My arsenal has always been my mind, not my company, not my products, but my perception of the data received through my senses. My writing is empirical based on the lessons learned, which I feel may be of some use to the reader.
The persistent theme is for the reader to recognize how we have been programmed by our society, and how it has failed to work for either society or us. Our leaders are hesitant to take calculated risks, personal, professional, economic and social. They often mouth the right words but their actions seem to always lag.
Our society tries desperately to stuff us back in the box, close the lid, and label us, “content.” I have resisted that, climbed out of the box only to be pushed back in, as have many others. It has been the nature of my life. If others can identify with this, and learn from what I have done, all the better. If they are content in the box, as it has labeled them, so be it. They will not find my writing relevant much less useful.
At this late date in my life, I have a surprising reservoir of energy to keep climbing out. Society would prefer I read my books, listen to my music, do a spot of travel to dissipate my energy, and wait for the Great Reaper to come and close the lid permanently on me. Somehow I resist. Somehow I think there is more to life. Somehow I believe we were not meant to be content but to be engaged, not to go quietly into the night but to embrace the darkness for its last glimmer of light. I go back to Goethe to find my resonance. I hope I complete my novel before I die, but if I don’t, I don’t.
BB tells me that Brad Pitt confesses his greatest fear is death. I don’t fear death.
She asked me, “What then is your greatest fear?”
“I have no trouble with dying,” I said. “I've lived longer and better than I expected as a son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman. I do have one fear, though, and that is losing my mind to Alzheimer’s. It happened to a brilliant uncle when he was younger than I am now. His mind left him and it was a long goodbye.”
I believe it is easy to forget what good company the mind is, to write what you have written, to ponder the great and small questions. As bad as things may get, if you have your mind you have good company and blessed by the Almighty. I know I am.
Bill Livingston, a dear friend, published a piece on my uncle in his engineering newsletter. I suppose I should publish that on my website one day. It is a touching story dealing with my discovery of his Alzheimer’s. Yes, I think I shall do that.
I’ve wandered away from your two concerns: the fact that this piece was not as uplifting as expected, and my take on plagiarism was rather harsh. It was Voltaire who said, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Discourse is not discursive although at times it may appear to be.
I posted this piece from CONFIDENT SELLING to assure my readers I am writing, as I write every day. It was taken out of context, which is always dangerous. I am thinking of posting another controversial piece about mythology, science and religion in the Information Age, which I have tentatively titled, “Extreme Unction: When Things Go From Bad To Worse.” I attempt to show science and society have killed the imagination and settled for innovation.
All the electronic wonders were imagined fifty to one hundred years ago. The Internet came out of the particle accelerator known as “CERN” on the Franco-Swiss border established in 1954. Much earlier, Einstein, Planck, Kirchhoff, and Bohr led the way to nuclear energy and quantum science.
Basic science has supplied the imagination, and technology the innovative platform for these wonderful gadgets. Technology has managed to draw us closer together while deepening the divide between us. In contrast, imagination was the primary tool in the laboratory of the mind for centuries. Even Einstein, who bridges the nineteenth and twentieth century, had only his magnets, a watch, pencil and paper to wonder beyond Newton’s Laws to his own. He lived in his imagination, as Carl Sagan puts it, “Such a man occurs only about every three or four hundred years.”
When he was my age, Einstein had second thoughts, but he had already stepped out of the box and published them, often in short mathematical equations. These were pondered, studied, eventually verified, and exploited in the world we live in. Mathematics has such a pristine order, such purity of language, and yet it has kept philosophers spinning in their soup ever since trying to make sense of the world they have created.
All of these men were mere mortals standing on each others shoulders down to our age, exploring and discovering and paying little heed to the consequences of their imaginings. Innovators have run with their ideas with equal disdain. Has anyone asked, at what price? Every time we cut ourselves further from the natural into the world of the synthetic, we pay a dear price, as we can never go back. We sacrifice “what was” for “what is. We never look back, consequently, we never see ahead.
We bumble, stumble and rumble along, and when we do look back, if we do, we always paint “what was” with a kind brush with no smears that might implicate us in our sonambulance, and then wonder at our fate.
Some see me as a pessimist as looking on the dark side of things. Perhaps a generation or so from this time will have to judge whether or not that is true. Certainly, the present generation or my generation has too much at stake to claim otherwise. We are programmed to get along by going along. We Americans have been placed in a comfortable box and have been content in that box until recent times.
Even now as the rhetoric is all about change, I see the $825 billion stimulus package president Barak Obama proposes, good intentions notwithstanding, being handled in much the same way as in the past, with bureaucrats, corpocracy and lobbyists protecting their self-interest, the country be damned!
That is how my mind sees things. It has been my best friend for these more than seven decades. I walked today thinking how much I cherish that mind, and how I hope it is stimulating to yours.
A final thought. As I concluded my walk, an image of a distant friend came to mind. When I was a boy not yet nine, playing baseball over at the courthouse, there was a young teenager that was one of my coaches. His name was Jack Dunmore. I write about him IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE. Jack knew I was sensitive to things other guys took for granted. One day he said to me, “Rube,” that was my nickname, “it is okay.” He patted me on my head, and said, “Let me hit you some balls.” That was it. No lecture. No message. He accepted me as I was, and helped me accept myself as I was. He guided me in that early life, as his best friend, Gussie Witt helped me be a better baseball catcher and hitter.
I wonder if kids today have older kids they look up to who have such an impact on their lives. Here I am looking back more than sixty years and still appreciative what that experience meant to me. I pay tribute to him in these closing words, whose life ended far too early, “Thank you, Jack.”
THE READER’S COMMENT (Response No. One):
Hello Jim,
Wow! This is an emotionally charged piece. Much of what you send to the email list or post on your blog is typically presents your views as more positive and even forgiving in the way errors are used as teaching moments. One thing I enjoy about reading you is your gift to send emotion through your words. Another thing that keeps me coming back is its orientation toward solutions. Not that you always provide the answer but rather point in the direction of the answer, as any good teacher should, leading the reader to discover what's right for his or her situation.
The message received is, to a degree, dependent on the reader's state of mind. I'm feeling fairly positive right now. I had to check that before composing this. The CONFIDENT THINKING excerpt surprised me as an odd hybrid of disgust and despair with a glimmer of light in the penultimate paragraph. Is that how you felt or what you intended when writing it? Or, maybe it is presented as contrast to confident thinking.
Each of the institutions you mention - philosophical and physical - were commonly used as touchstones to gage and validate our actions. Is it the failure of the institutions that man has, over the last three decades, drifted from using morals and ethical standards as guides? While delivering training in the past, I would have fun talking about everyone's favorite radio station - WII FM - What's In It For Me. Not realizing it would become the new touchstone of our lives. This economic morass was born in greed. A majority of us were complicit in promoting the attitude and disguising it in the "noble" quest for the American dream. We forgot the dream is not realized through another's nightmare. It is not realized by climbing over others or capitalizing on their desperation (as sub-prime mortgage brokers did) or standing on the shoulders of laborers to be noticed (as all the "great" CEOs of the Eighties and Nineties did.)
But others, as yourself, rose above all this and refused to view the world through lime-tinted glasses. Their voices, muffled by the noise of the chase, will now be heard as the din dies down and people slow down. The voices must speak a positive message that draws in those looking for the new path. There is great appeal in that approach, the example - Obama.
One unsupported theory regarding why today's employees and populace do not respond to past bashing. They are all winners. Everybody played. Everybody got a trophy. Couldn't get an "A" in class, we'll put you in a slower group where you can compete. We won't call it slow; we'll call it "special." Losing and faulting is foreign. At least in a personal sense it is. They seldom had opportunities to introspectively review the why of personal failure because getting a trophy means you didn't fail. So, writing about the failures of institutions and leaders does not connect with this new breed.
Michael
READER’S COMMENT (Response No. 2):
Hello Jim,
I held this for a couple of days, just to make sure. The following is something I don't often engage in writing but save for oral discussion. The give and take is more fun that way.
At the end of this piece you touch on plagiarism and theft of intellectual property. The two quotes placed before your discussion heightens the conundrum presented by the concept of plagiarism. Same thought in different words, same words in a different light. To personalize the question, I have read many books and couldn't quote verbatim from any of them. I read then internalize the concepts. Some I dispute by formulating arguments in my head. Then both sides become internalized. It's all bouncing among the neurons waiting to be let out by some external stimulus.
Moving on, plagiarism is about the expression of original ideas and thoughts. The specter is often raised when the theft of original ideas or thoughts is literal. How granular does plagiarism get? I can understand whole articles. Phrases present a more gray area. Over time, every word has been used. Most pairs and triads of words that make sense have been written or uttered also. A combination of words that expresses a unique thought or idea can be rewritten and thus plagiarized. Yet, in any dictionary, nearly every word is followed by multiple definitions. The shorter the phrase use to express a thought, the more likely it can be interpreted differently.
I am not going to defend or condemn the statement, but use it as an example. I remember reading about attribution of the Kennedy statement decades ago. True to my practice, I couldn't tell you where. And, even then, my focus was on the meaning of the specific words and how, over time, they could have changed. A word intended to be specific still could have two interpretations in the same context. For example: Country, when acting on us, is perceived as the government and all of its bureaucracy. That which we do for the Country is not to support the bureaucrats, but references our fellow citizens. The same way a citizen might go to war for a government to support its aggression as opposed to going to war to defend one's neighbors. In this the question becomes, while the words are the same is the thought behind the words the same? Kennedy was a proponent of civil service that did not end at our borders. As a thought, initially expressed in a phrase, is expanded, justified and made specific through argument and explanation it becomes easier to claim as unique and original.
This dovetails a discussion of, "Who discovered America?" Was it Columbus, Erickson, or some obscure, prehistoric Asian who first crossed the Bering Sea? Or, even further, the "tree falling in the woods" philosophic banter. If a thought is expressed that no one hears, can it be plagiarized?
So, back to the conundrum. Could it be that everything I've ever written has been plagiarized? Everything I know I've learned from someone. Surely, at various points in time, I have expressed ideas and concepts picked up from your books and those of others. While in school I found being heretical in my arguments was helpful at avoiding plagiarism, but risky to earning good grades. But, heretics are authors too.
To close, Columbus "discovered" America because the trail he blazed was, in short time, followed and followed often. Kennedy "authored" the words, "Ask not...." because, framed as they were in the context of his inaugural address, they inspired a generation and spurred a nation to service and action.
Michael
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 25, 2009
REFERENCE:
This reader created two compelling essays to, “Creativity In A Changing World.” He says in the first, “One thing I enjoy about reading you is your gift to send emotion through your words.” In the second, he has much to say about plagiarism. His comments throughout are thoughtful and reflective. It shows a beautiful mind as you will see when you read his two essays. In A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), I suggest that we are all born wonderers and therefore philosophers. Allan W. Watts captured this sentiment: “A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gapes and stares at what sensible people take for granted, a person who cannot get rid of the feeling that the barest of facts of everyday life are unbelievably odd. Aristotle put it best, the beginning of philosophy is wonder.” Michael is a wonderer and therefore a philosopher. I cherish the connection.
* * * * * *
“It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled, thenceforth, to steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who can entertain it and of him who can adequately place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882), American poet, essayist and philosopher
* * * * * *
“What stubbing, plowing, digging, and barrowing are to land, that thinking, reflecting, examining are to the mind. Each has its proper culture; and as the land that is suffered to lie waste and wild for a long time will be overspread with brushwood, brambles, and thorns, which have neither use nor beauty, so there will not fail to sprout up in a neglected uncultivated mind, a great number of prejudices and absurd opinions, which owe their origin partly to the soil itself, the passions, and imperfections of the mind of man, and partly to those seeds which chance to be scattered in it by every wind of doctrine which the cunning of statesmen, the singularity of pedants, and the superstition of fools shall raise.”
George Berkeley (1685 – 1753), Irish Catholic Bishop and Philosopher
* * * * * *
DR. FISHER’S RESPONSE (The Reader’s Essays follow):
It was Solomon who said there was nothing new under the sun. You are correct in saying that includes the printed word. Plagiarism, as Emerson eludes above, is a touchy subject. I am not a lawyer. I have no training in the law. I know the dictionary definition of plagiarism: “To steel and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own, to use source material without due credit, to commit literary theft. “
Trained as an academic, the basis of Ph.D. scholarship, if you have occasion to read some scholarly journals, you know you can’t get past two words without sources listed. It is confusing and incomprehensible for the reader to make sense of writer’s point. So trained, I can tell you it takes hard work to get beyond this to express something of interest to the general reader. Were it not for the help of BB, I don’t know if I’d have made the turn. She’s not sure I have.
As you may note from the Bishop Berkeley quote above, someone who died in the eighteenth century, I have expressed similar ideas before. Now, you see the connection.
When I made reference to plagiarism, I did so with reference to president Kennedy’s use of “ask not” in his inaugural without giving credit to Kahlil Gibran, who first uttered the phrase forty years before to the Lebanese people.
My thought was that it would have been nice to give a Lebanese man who came to America his due. He wrote many inspiring books, including “The Prophet” (1923) to bridge the Islam with the American world. I believe I have read every one of his published books including his autobiography. I mention this to register my fascination with him. He touched a cord in me as a reader, writer, and citizen of the world.
The azimuth to where I am now from whence I came has encountered many bumps in the road; taken many false steps, stumble upon many surprises, while gaining insights, which have driven me to the printed word. It is always a danger to lift remarks from a body of work and expect them to stand on their own.
As I write, I find this book developing gravitas that wasn’t originally intended. That can happen. I wanted to provoke the reader “to think, to reflect, to examine the mind.” Given the way it is today, when thinking is a luxury, I find us tilling the same fields until they are fallow, and cannot stand by and say nothing.
Michael, my friend, we are stuck. Paul Krugman, a liberal Democrat, expresses this in his New York Times column (January 24, 2009):
“My real problem with the speech (Obama inaugural), on matters economic, was its conventionality. In response to an unprecedented economic crisis – or, more accurately, a crisis whose only real precedence is the Great Depression – Obama did what people in Washington do when they want to sound serious: He spoke in the abstract, of the need to make hard choices and stand up to special interests. That’s not enough. In fact, it’s not even right.”
It is what I call hesitation rhetoric based on critical thinking. My book is opposed to this thinking exclusive to creative thinking because the dog ends up always chasing its own tail.
The other day I told my daughter, a recent college graduate who cannot find a job, that anti-intellectualism is not endemic to the rank & file Americans, alone, but is pervasive in our hallow halls of ivy in academia to the paved streets of the rich and privileged across the land. How so?
I believe it goes back to William James and our pride in pragmatism. James was opposed to his brother Henry’s intellectualism, and said so often in print. Pragmatism is anti-intellectual and American. We take pride in shortcuts to insight to avoid the icy roads, sinkholes, washed out bridges and mudslides of life that still prove unavoidable. It is why self-help books, diet pills, personal trainers and liposuction are so in demand. We’ll do almost anything to avoid thought or action to register change.
President Obama went on to say: “Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week, last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions, that time has surely passed.”
It wasn’t plagiarism, per se, but the famous economist of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes, said practically the same thing then, and only World War II lifted the United States and the world out of the depression.
American workers are congratulated for their industry, productivity and creativity when it has been my experience at virtually all levels of organization that four people are standing around waiting for instructions while the fifth person is taking the initiative and doing most of the work.
As for plagiarism, I read others, as do you, and as they took from those who influenced them, I have taken from them who have influenced me. You are right. There is no originality only a different insight or elaboration on an idea. If you read the quotes ahead of my essays, you will note they give you a sense of what is to follow.
My intention is to provoke the reader to consider reexamining his views on subjects taken for granted. As a mature graduate student, taking all these academic courses, I was continually instructed it wasn’t good scholarship to slide back and forth from the particular to the general, from the individual to society as if a seamless network. I explained to my professors empirically why I was of such a mind. You would have thought I’d spoke heresy. They weren’t used to having a student question their discipline much less its methodology. You can imagine it wasn’t an especially happy courtship, or blissful marriage. Even today, I suspect few academics read me.
That said I would visit the four quadrants of a city, talk to citizens of various occupations, and have a profile of that city’s personality, demographics and geography.
People love a listener, and are uncommonly candid to a stranger. This results in an accurate assessment of how that community thinks, believes, values, and behaves, as well as how it perceives itself.
Joseph Wambaugh, the former Los Angeles Police Department sergeant, and best selling author once said, “A community gets the police it deserves.” Indeed, it does. During the 1970s, I did police consulting from New York City to Miami on the east coast of the United States. My Ph.D. dissertation was based on that work. It was titled “The Police Paradox: Systematic Exploration in the Paradoxical Dilemma of the Police and the Policed” (1978). I found not only did police reflect the behavior of the community, but also the police community reflected the behavior of that wider community it served.
Earlier in my career, when I was a chemical sales engineer for Nalco Chemical Company, steeped in technology, a world of jargon, and a tool kit of impressive laboratory toys, I quickly learned these were of secondary importance to reading the contact accurately. I would note the appearance, tone, temperament and cordiality of the receptionist as an index of what was to follow. I would also study how the reception lobby was laid out and what it was trying to tell me. I would observe how buyers treated other sellers, and whether they were invited to their offices or not. It never occurred to me I was doing a social psychological study, but I was.
It worked for me to such an extent it would change my life. When I was in graduate school, I attempted to share this with my professors, only to be reminded “they had the power of the grade,” and so I left it at that. Yet, my experience tells me:
(1) Everything is connected to everything else;
(2) Everything has to go somewhere to mean something;
(3) Nature knows best and is expressed in our nature; we cannot change that fact.
(4) There is no such thing as a free lunch, free ride, or action without consequences.
My arsenal has always been my mind, not my company, not my products, but my perception of the data received through my senses. My writing is empirical based on the lessons learned, which I feel may be of some use to the reader.
The persistent theme is for the reader to recognize how we have been programmed by our society, and how it has failed to work for either society or us. Our leaders are hesitant to take calculated risks, personal, professional, economic and social. They often mouth the right words but their actions seem to always lag.
Our society tries desperately to stuff us back in the box, close the lid, and label us, “content.” I have resisted that, climbed out of the box only to be pushed back in, as have many others. It has been the nature of my life. If others can identify with this, and learn from what I have done, all the better. If they are content in the box, as it has labeled them, so be it. They will not find my writing relevant much less useful.
At this late date in my life, I have a surprising reservoir of energy to keep climbing out. Society would prefer I read my books, listen to my music, do a spot of travel to dissipate my energy, and wait for the Great Reaper to come and close the lid permanently on me. Somehow I resist. Somehow I think there is more to life. Somehow I believe we were not meant to be content but to be engaged, not to go quietly into the night but to embrace the darkness for its last glimmer of light. I go back to Goethe to find my resonance. I hope I complete my novel before I die, but if I don’t, I don’t.
BB tells me that Brad Pitt confesses his greatest fear is death. I don’t fear death.
She asked me, “What then is your greatest fear?”
“I have no trouble with dying,” I said. “I've lived longer and better than I expected as a son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman. I do have one fear, though, and that is losing my mind to Alzheimer’s. It happened to a brilliant uncle when he was younger than I am now. His mind left him and it was a long goodbye.”
I believe it is easy to forget what good company the mind is, to write what you have written, to ponder the great and small questions. As bad as things may get, if you have your mind you have good company and blessed by the Almighty. I know I am.
Bill Livingston, a dear friend, published a piece on my uncle in his engineering newsletter. I suppose I should publish that on my website one day. It is a touching story dealing with my discovery of his Alzheimer’s. Yes, I think I shall do that.
I’ve wandered away from your two concerns: the fact that this piece was not as uplifting as expected, and my take on plagiarism was rather harsh. It was Voltaire who said, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Discourse is not discursive although at times it may appear to be.
I posted this piece from CONFIDENT SELLING to assure my readers I am writing, as I write every day. It was taken out of context, which is always dangerous. I am thinking of posting another controversial piece about mythology, science and religion in the Information Age, which I have tentatively titled, “Extreme Unction: When Things Go From Bad To Worse.” I attempt to show science and society have killed the imagination and settled for innovation.
All the electronic wonders were imagined fifty to one hundred years ago. The Internet came out of the particle accelerator known as “CERN” on the Franco-Swiss border established in 1954. Much earlier, Einstein, Planck, Kirchhoff, and Bohr led the way to nuclear energy and quantum science.
Basic science has supplied the imagination, and technology the innovative platform for these wonderful gadgets. Technology has managed to draw us closer together while deepening the divide between us. In contrast, imagination was the primary tool in the laboratory of the mind for centuries. Even Einstein, who bridges the nineteenth and twentieth century, had only his magnets, a watch, pencil and paper to wonder beyond Newton’s Laws to his own. He lived in his imagination, as Carl Sagan puts it, “Such a man occurs only about every three or four hundred years.”
When he was my age, Einstein had second thoughts, but he had already stepped out of the box and published them, often in short mathematical equations. These were pondered, studied, eventually verified, and exploited in the world we live in. Mathematics has such a pristine order, such purity of language, and yet it has kept philosophers spinning in their soup ever since trying to make sense of the world they have created.
All of these men were mere mortals standing on each others shoulders down to our age, exploring and discovering and paying little heed to the consequences of their imaginings. Innovators have run with their ideas with equal disdain. Has anyone asked, at what price? Every time we cut ourselves further from the natural into the world of the synthetic, we pay a dear price, as we can never go back. We sacrifice “what was” for “what is. We never look back, consequently, we never see ahead.
We bumble, stumble and rumble along, and when we do look back, if we do, we always paint “what was” with a kind brush with no smears that might implicate us in our sonambulance, and then wonder at our fate.
Some see me as a pessimist as looking on the dark side of things. Perhaps a generation or so from this time will have to judge whether or not that is true. Certainly, the present generation or my generation has too much at stake to claim otherwise. We are programmed to get along by going along. We Americans have been placed in a comfortable box and have been content in that box until recent times.
Even now as the rhetoric is all about change, I see the $825 billion stimulus package president Barak Obama proposes, good intentions notwithstanding, being handled in much the same way as in the past, with bureaucrats, corpocracy and lobbyists protecting their self-interest, the country be damned!
That is how my mind sees things. It has been my best friend for these more than seven decades. I walked today thinking how much I cherish that mind, and how I hope it is stimulating to yours.
A final thought. As I concluded my walk, an image of a distant friend came to mind. When I was a boy not yet nine, playing baseball over at the courthouse, there was a young teenager that was one of my coaches. His name was Jack Dunmore. I write about him IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE. Jack knew I was sensitive to things other guys took for granted. One day he said to me, “Rube,” that was my nickname, “it is okay.” He patted me on my head, and said, “Let me hit you some balls.” That was it. No lecture. No message. He accepted me as I was, and helped me accept myself as I was. He guided me in that early life, as his best friend, Gussie Witt helped me be a better baseball catcher and hitter.
I wonder if kids today have older kids they look up to who have such an impact on their lives. Here I am looking back more than sixty years and still appreciative what that experience meant to me. I pay tribute to him in these closing words, whose life ended far too early, “Thank you, Jack.”
THE READER’S COMMENT (Response No. One):
Hello Jim,
Wow! This is an emotionally charged piece. Much of what you send to the email list or post on your blog is typically presents your views as more positive and even forgiving in the way errors are used as teaching moments. One thing I enjoy about reading you is your gift to send emotion through your words. Another thing that keeps me coming back is its orientation toward solutions. Not that you always provide the answer but rather point in the direction of the answer, as any good teacher should, leading the reader to discover what's right for his or her situation.
The message received is, to a degree, dependent on the reader's state of mind. I'm feeling fairly positive right now. I had to check that before composing this. The CONFIDENT THINKING excerpt surprised me as an odd hybrid of disgust and despair with a glimmer of light in the penultimate paragraph. Is that how you felt or what you intended when writing it? Or, maybe it is presented as contrast to confident thinking.
Each of the institutions you mention - philosophical and physical - were commonly used as touchstones to gage and validate our actions. Is it the failure of the institutions that man has, over the last three decades, drifted from using morals and ethical standards as guides? While delivering training in the past, I would have fun talking about everyone's favorite radio station - WII FM - What's In It For Me. Not realizing it would become the new touchstone of our lives. This economic morass was born in greed. A majority of us were complicit in promoting the attitude and disguising it in the "noble" quest for the American dream. We forgot the dream is not realized through another's nightmare. It is not realized by climbing over others or capitalizing on their desperation (as sub-prime mortgage brokers did) or standing on the shoulders of laborers to be noticed (as all the "great" CEOs of the Eighties and Nineties did.)
But others, as yourself, rose above all this and refused to view the world through lime-tinted glasses. Their voices, muffled by the noise of the chase, will now be heard as the din dies down and people slow down. The voices must speak a positive message that draws in those looking for the new path. There is great appeal in that approach, the example - Obama.
One unsupported theory regarding why today's employees and populace do not respond to past bashing. They are all winners. Everybody played. Everybody got a trophy. Couldn't get an "A" in class, we'll put you in a slower group where you can compete. We won't call it slow; we'll call it "special." Losing and faulting is foreign. At least in a personal sense it is. They seldom had opportunities to introspectively review the why of personal failure because getting a trophy means you didn't fail. So, writing about the failures of institutions and leaders does not connect with this new breed.
Michael
READER’S COMMENT (Response No. 2):
Hello Jim,
I held this for a couple of days, just to make sure. The following is something I don't often engage in writing but save for oral discussion. The give and take is more fun that way.
At the end of this piece you touch on plagiarism and theft of intellectual property. The two quotes placed before your discussion heightens the conundrum presented by the concept of plagiarism. Same thought in different words, same words in a different light. To personalize the question, I have read many books and couldn't quote verbatim from any of them. I read then internalize the concepts. Some I dispute by formulating arguments in my head. Then both sides become internalized. It's all bouncing among the neurons waiting to be let out by some external stimulus.
Moving on, plagiarism is about the expression of original ideas and thoughts. The specter is often raised when the theft of original ideas or thoughts is literal. How granular does plagiarism get? I can understand whole articles. Phrases present a more gray area. Over time, every word has been used. Most pairs and triads of words that make sense have been written or uttered also. A combination of words that expresses a unique thought or idea can be rewritten and thus plagiarized. Yet, in any dictionary, nearly every word is followed by multiple definitions. The shorter the phrase use to express a thought, the more likely it can be interpreted differently.
I am not going to defend or condemn the statement, but use it as an example. I remember reading about attribution of the Kennedy statement decades ago. True to my practice, I couldn't tell you where. And, even then, my focus was on the meaning of the specific words and how, over time, they could have changed. A word intended to be specific still could have two interpretations in the same context. For example: Country, when acting on us, is perceived as the government and all of its bureaucracy. That which we do for the Country is not to support the bureaucrats, but references our fellow citizens. The same way a citizen might go to war for a government to support its aggression as opposed to going to war to defend one's neighbors. In this the question becomes, while the words are the same is the thought behind the words the same? Kennedy was a proponent of civil service that did not end at our borders. As a thought, initially expressed in a phrase, is expanded, justified and made specific through argument and explanation it becomes easier to claim as unique and original.
This dovetails a discussion of, "Who discovered America?" Was it Columbus, Erickson, or some obscure, prehistoric Asian who first crossed the Bering Sea? Or, even further, the "tree falling in the woods" philosophic banter. If a thought is expressed that no one hears, can it be plagiarized?
So, back to the conundrum. Could it be that everything I've ever written has been plagiarized? Everything I know I've learned from someone. Surely, at various points in time, I have expressed ideas and concepts picked up from your books and those of others. While in school I found being heretical in my arguments was helpful at avoiding plagiarism, but risky to earning good grades. But, heretics are authors too.
To close, Columbus "discovered" America because the trail he blazed was, in short time, followed and followed often. Kennedy "authored" the words, "Ask not...." because, framed as they were in the context of his inaugural address, they inspired a generation and spurred a nation to service and action.
Michael
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
CREATIVITY IN A CHANGING WORLD!
CREATIVITY IN A CHANGING WORLD!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 21, 2009
“Goodness consists not in the outward things we do, but in the inward thing we are. To be good is the great thing.”
Edwin Hubbell (1814 – 1880), American clergy
* * * * * *
REFERENCE: This is an excerpt from CONFIDENT THINKING (a book in progress).
* * * * * *
While modernity celebrates its accomplishments, goodness has often been on holiday in a homeless mind. The greatest challenge to creativity is finding the key to behaving in peace, harmony and mutual support of each other, starting with those with the most abdicating their self-indulgent lifestyles and behaving more responsibly.
Once the role of religion was to spread light in this darkness and guide the human soul to find its way forward to goodness and light, but no more. It would appear religion has lost its way in the past century or so. Now God is confined to pomp and circumstance, ritual and rites of passage, or jihads, but not a deciding factor in normal daily life. Vitality, essential to creative endeavor, has gone out of this institution, but why?
Materialism engulfs the planet and materialism has nothing to do with leadership. Leadership has always been grounded in spirituality, and it is missing today, everywhere. Modern surrogates to religion, the social sciences, have only compounded the problem with their doublespeak and suspect research, mainly, because they are critical thinkers.
Psychiatry has failed; psychology has failed; anthropology has failed; sociology has failed; all the social and behavioral sciences have failed because their attention has been on description rather than on action. Most of what they tell us we already know, and that is the problem. We need to find away out, not more sophisticated explanations why we are in the puzzle of our dilemma. Listen to your priest or minister or rabbi and you will hear an echo of these disciplines. It is the hesitation rhetoric of those who don’t want to hurt the feelings or purses of powerful special interests. Or could it be a search for the perfect definition of truth? If so, there is an inherent problem in the quest.
Plato is said to have been dominated by a geometric or mathematical model as his thoughts operate on lines which are conditioned by the idea that there are axiomatic truths that can be uncover with severe logic to infer certain infallible conclusions. Bono claims we suffer from this perfect paradigm, the notion that somewhere “out there” a perfect vision exists like the Holy Grail.
As de Bono insists, and empiricism supports, you don’t search for truth; you create truth. I am aware I am stepping on Sacred Cows, a man of no distinction making such assumptions. How dare I? Well, I dare. I speak out of a long life of a world I have seen that is not tidy and has no rational order. I have lived to see revolutionists begin as liberators and end in some sort of despotism. I have seen the growth of corporate America begin and end thusly. I have seen universities begin as citadels of the open exchange of ideas and end as political sanctuaries for stunted ideologies. I have seen grammar and high schools begin with no notion of obligation and duty and end as preparation factories for the university system. I have seen science begin with a quest for the natural order and end being pimped by corpocracy to meet its insatiable appetite for new gadgets to promote happiness.
Our human institutions once were meant to serve us, but now they are designed for us to serve them. The values they once espoused such as integrity, sincerity, readiness to sacrifice our life to some inner light, dedication to some ideal for which it was considered worth sacrificing all that we were, for which it was worth both living and dying has passed. A little over a century ago, people admired wholeheartedness, sincerity, purity of soul, the ability and readiness to dedicate themselves to their ideals no matter what they were. That, too, has gone.
These disciplines are concerned with the values that arise from the “truth,” but what is truth? Christianity has its truth, Judaism its truth, Islam its truth, and are they not the same truth? Can there be a menu of cafeteria truths? Religions may be in decline but the old habit of formulating creeds and imposing belief in dogma persists even among atheists. The strange idolatrous overestimation of words and symbols, emblems and totems continues unchecked.
The truth is man is addicted to death and not to life; to self-destruction, and not self-creation. His teacher often is poverty, ignorance, and neglect. But paradoxically, that same teacher is often wealth, knowledge, and luxury. Waste from neglect and waste from indulgence are still forms of the same waste.
Social sciences search for understanding of man’s plight with statistical correlations rather than designing means to ameliorate the suffering. Action! They operate from ivory towers not from the trenches of the sick and weary. Action! They can be found as consultants in the boardrooms of corpocracy, not on the line. Action! They conduct studies of penal institutions rather than developing strategies to civilize the lost. Action!
Likewise, modern medicine and pharmacology seek to discover cures for AIDS and other lifestyle diseases playing a complicit role with social science and critical thinking. It is behavior that causes this dreaded disease, the disease of poverty, of lost hope, of unemployment, of corruption, and always, neglect.
It is no longer a matter of discovering “what is” the problem, but of designing a way forward out of it, not with a drug, not with a strategy, not with a master plan, not with the commitment of billions by philanthropists, not with fund raising concerts, but with education and training. A better miracle than feeding the hungry loafs and fishes is to teach them how to produce grain, bake bread, and fish.
It may be a matter of creating new bold counterintuitive ideas directly opposed to conventional logic rather than repeating the standard ones.
There is no point in judging dysfunctional governments, evil as some may be. Energy might better be directed at finding a way to make connection. Many African leaders, for example, have never gotten past their deep-seated hatred of repressive colonialism that still rankles them to the bone marrow although long gone.
The same applies to AIDS. It is not a moral issue. A way forward is only possible if there is a softening of hard-edged thinking and condescending morality. Bless the Doctors Without Boarders; bless the volunteers in the most deprived circumstances; bless the missionaries that quietly educate and train, minister and love; bless the UN workers who have found a life’s purpose; bless Bill Gates and his foundation, bless Bono and his work with the UN to forgive the debt of small insolvent African nations, bless the journalists that attempt to reveal the source of the carnage; bless actors like George Cooney and his father who attempt to bring attention to the suffering; and bless all the others who are the exception to this charge.
Noble as they are there are far too few of them. They are the heroes of our times, and the hope of our future because they understand the challenge of creativity in a changing world. They are like George Eliot’s definition of goodness, showing in their actions a desire for what is perfectly good without knowing clearly what it is. They are not waiting for the perfect moment or quintessential paradigm; they are a very small army of hope creating good.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 21, 2009
“Goodness consists not in the outward things we do, but in the inward thing we are. To be good is the great thing.”
Edwin Hubbell (1814 – 1880), American clergy
* * * * * *
REFERENCE: This is an excerpt from CONFIDENT THINKING (a book in progress).
* * * * * *
While modernity celebrates its accomplishments, goodness has often been on holiday in a homeless mind. The greatest challenge to creativity is finding the key to behaving in peace, harmony and mutual support of each other, starting with those with the most abdicating their self-indulgent lifestyles and behaving more responsibly.
Once the role of religion was to spread light in this darkness and guide the human soul to find its way forward to goodness and light, but no more. It would appear religion has lost its way in the past century or so. Now God is confined to pomp and circumstance, ritual and rites of passage, or jihads, but not a deciding factor in normal daily life. Vitality, essential to creative endeavor, has gone out of this institution, but why?
Materialism engulfs the planet and materialism has nothing to do with leadership. Leadership has always been grounded in spirituality, and it is missing today, everywhere. Modern surrogates to religion, the social sciences, have only compounded the problem with their doublespeak and suspect research, mainly, because they are critical thinkers.
Psychiatry has failed; psychology has failed; anthropology has failed; sociology has failed; all the social and behavioral sciences have failed because their attention has been on description rather than on action. Most of what they tell us we already know, and that is the problem. We need to find away out, not more sophisticated explanations why we are in the puzzle of our dilemma. Listen to your priest or minister or rabbi and you will hear an echo of these disciplines. It is the hesitation rhetoric of those who don’t want to hurt the feelings or purses of powerful special interests. Or could it be a search for the perfect definition of truth? If so, there is an inherent problem in the quest.
Plato is said to have been dominated by a geometric or mathematical model as his thoughts operate on lines which are conditioned by the idea that there are axiomatic truths that can be uncover with severe logic to infer certain infallible conclusions. Bono claims we suffer from this perfect paradigm, the notion that somewhere “out there” a perfect vision exists like the Holy Grail.
As de Bono insists, and empiricism supports, you don’t search for truth; you create truth. I am aware I am stepping on Sacred Cows, a man of no distinction making such assumptions. How dare I? Well, I dare. I speak out of a long life of a world I have seen that is not tidy and has no rational order. I have lived to see revolutionists begin as liberators and end in some sort of despotism. I have seen the growth of corporate America begin and end thusly. I have seen universities begin as citadels of the open exchange of ideas and end as political sanctuaries for stunted ideologies. I have seen grammar and high schools begin with no notion of obligation and duty and end as preparation factories for the university system. I have seen science begin with a quest for the natural order and end being pimped by corpocracy to meet its insatiable appetite for new gadgets to promote happiness.
Our human institutions once were meant to serve us, but now they are designed for us to serve them. The values they once espoused such as integrity, sincerity, readiness to sacrifice our life to some inner light, dedication to some ideal for which it was considered worth sacrificing all that we were, for which it was worth both living and dying has passed. A little over a century ago, people admired wholeheartedness, sincerity, purity of soul, the ability and readiness to dedicate themselves to their ideals no matter what they were. That, too, has gone.
These disciplines are concerned with the values that arise from the “truth,” but what is truth? Christianity has its truth, Judaism its truth, Islam its truth, and are they not the same truth? Can there be a menu of cafeteria truths? Religions may be in decline but the old habit of formulating creeds and imposing belief in dogma persists even among atheists. The strange idolatrous overestimation of words and symbols, emblems and totems continues unchecked.
The truth is man is addicted to death and not to life; to self-destruction, and not self-creation. His teacher often is poverty, ignorance, and neglect. But paradoxically, that same teacher is often wealth, knowledge, and luxury. Waste from neglect and waste from indulgence are still forms of the same waste.
Social sciences search for understanding of man’s plight with statistical correlations rather than designing means to ameliorate the suffering. Action! They operate from ivory towers not from the trenches of the sick and weary. Action! They can be found as consultants in the boardrooms of corpocracy, not on the line. Action! They conduct studies of penal institutions rather than developing strategies to civilize the lost. Action!
Likewise, modern medicine and pharmacology seek to discover cures for AIDS and other lifestyle diseases playing a complicit role with social science and critical thinking. It is behavior that causes this dreaded disease, the disease of poverty, of lost hope, of unemployment, of corruption, and always, neglect.
It is no longer a matter of discovering “what is” the problem, but of designing a way forward out of it, not with a drug, not with a strategy, not with a master plan, not with the commitment of billions by philanthropists, not with fund raising concerts, but with education and training. A better miracle than feeding the hungry loafs and fishes is to teach them how to produce grain, bake bread, and fish.
It may be a matter of creating new bold counterintuitive ideas directly opposed to conventional logic rather than repeating the standard ones.
There is no point in judging dysfunctional governments, evil as some may be. Energy might better be directed at finding a way to make connection. Many African leaders, for example, have never gotten past their deep-seated hatred of repressive colonialism that still rankles them to the bone marrow although long gone.
The same applies to AIDS. It is not a moral issue. A way forward is only possible if there is a softening of hard-edged thinking and condescending morality. Bless the Doctors Without Boarders; bless the volunteers in the most deprived circumstances; bless the missionaries that quietly educate and train, minister and love; bless the UN workers who have found a life’s purpose; bless Bill Gates and his foundation, bless Bono and his work with the UN to forgive the debt of small insolvent African nations, bless the journalists that attempt to reveal the source of the carnage; bless actors like George Cooney and his father who attempt to bring attention to the suffering; and bless all the others who are the exception to this charge.
Noble as they are there are far too few of them. They are the heroes of our times, and the hope of our future because they understand the challenge of creativity in a changing world. They are like George Eliot’s definition of goodness, showing in their actions a desire for what is perfectly good without knowing clearly what it is. They are not waiting for the perfect moment or quintessential paradigm; they are a very small army of hope creating good.
PRESIDENT BARAK OBAMA CONFIRMS A DR. FISHER THESIS!
PRESIDENT BARAK OBAMA CONFIRMS A DR. FISHER THESIS!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 21, 2009
“The two most engaging powers of an author are, to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.”
Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1781), English author and lexicographer
“The most original authors are not so because they advance what is new, but because they put what they have to say as if it had never been said before.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 –1832), German poet, dramatist and philosopher
* * * * * *
When you are an idea guy, a reader of books, an observer of human behavior, and have the audacity to put your thoughts not only on paper, but in books, books that you often publish yourself for lack of name recognition, or even minor celebrity status, it is reassuring to hear one or more of your themes echoed in the words of our first African American president, Barak Obama.
President Obama urged Americans "to grow up." That has been a theme of mine, blatantly so; I might add, in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), THE WORKER, ALONE! (1995), TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996), SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998), CORPORATE SIN (2000) and A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007).
In my book, "Taboo," I chose the Thomas Paine essay that President Obama referenced General George Washington had read to his troops at a low point in the Revolutionary War, in concluding the book in the Afterword.
The whole theme of "Taboo" was Americans reluctance to grow up, and the consequences of not growing up. Many themes in that book are now prophetic; many others are far more exaggerated today instead of ameliorated. I thought I was being provocative, but I underestimated our capacity for self-indulgence and immaturity. If anything, we have slipped into early childhood, and wonder at our fate.
Celebrated columnist George Will writes eloquently today about president Obama's words that "The Time has come to set aside childish things." Of course, the president quoted from scripture, not from me, but my wonder is -- will it register?
I have described the American worker, which is most of us, in my writing as suspended in terminal adolescence in learned helplessness and arrested development counter dependent on our employers for our total well being.
I have further charged that management has been our surrogate parent and permanent baby-sitter, and that we have sacrificed control of our destiny for security, that we have given up freedom for comfort. As a consequence, we have become a complacent society.
We don't like to hear words such as these. We're optimists. Pessimism is a dirty word. We're told we have a bad attitude if we remind ourselves of our collective shortcomings. We even believe self-esteem is something you can purchase like a product, not something you have to earn by doing something worthwhile. Next to the bible more diet books are purchased than any other, people believing that diet is a formula and not a choice, as is also goodness. But I wander.
My writings (including postings on my website) are not themes to win friends and influence people. They are wake up calls of a sleepwalking nation in rote obedience to its nostalgia.
The irony is that workers everywhere have been telling me the things I write about but have always been afraid to be identified with for fear of hurting their careers or livelihood. I'll accept that. I've never had such fear and my career reflects it -- I should say "careers" as I've been in many kettles of fish.
My position is that these are themes that someone has to articulate sometime in some way or one day there won't be a time to contemplate them at all. It is nice to see President Obama is cognizant of and committed to addressing such basic or fundamental issues.
If you think I am trying to pat myself on the back, you have it all wrong. I accept the fact that I'm not read, that I'm an unknown, but it does rile me a bit that some famous people are given credit for saying things that they have taken from others.
This "growing up theme" has been much referenced since yesterday on PBS, the BBC, C-SPAN, and the German Television News, along with columns in local and national newspapers.
More than forty years ago, there was that famous line by president John F. Kennedy at his inaugural: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."
I had read that exact quote in a book of Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese poet, in the late 1950s. Gibran had actually used that expression in addressing his own Lebanese people in the 1920s, or forty years before Kennedy had said it.
Thomas Paine is mentioned today as being the source of General Washington's remark in 1776, but I've never seen a single mention of Kahlil Gibran's acknowledgment as the originator of Kennedy's famous line.
My BB just raises an eyebrow when I mention these things, and says, "How's your novel coming?"
Well, she knows it is not coming at all because I'm not working on it, but working on a couple books that, too, are unlikely to be read should they be published. You can imagine how I exasperate her sometimes.
One day I read a piece and told BB, "This guy can really write."
She said, "I knew you'd say that."
"Why?" I asked.
"You wrote it."
And by golly I had, but the author of the piece didn't give me any credit that I had.
Dr. Donald Farr has written before about plagiarism, and he is right, people do take from others, and they get away with it, too. When you are so small to be insignificant, there is not much you can do about it.
Given as I am to going off on tangents, I leave you with this. Some time ago, a young man who liked to work with his hands, but was left handed and couldn't find a suitable wrench for his work, invented a "left-handed-wrench."
This is where it gets interesting. He went to the main office of Sears and presented a copy of his wrench along with the plans for its construction. A Sears’s executive said they would "take it under advisement" and get back to him.
When they didn't, he returned to Sears and asked the status. "Oh, you didn't know? It was reviewed and found not feasible or commercially viable." He was given back the wrench and his plans without any further ado.
More than a year later, he was skimming a Sears’s catalogue, and came across the offer of a left-handed wrench, a wrench that looked suspiciously like his. He ordered it, and upon receipt of it, found it was identical to his.
Unbeknown to Sears, apparently thinking he was just a muck who knew no better, and would be intimidated by "corpocracy" and its giant corporate monarchy, he had, in the interim, successfully patented the wrench.
With no money, but patent, and Sears's wrench in hand, he found lawyers all over town that wanted to represent him. He settled with Sears for more than $5 million.
I mention this because it is little people that often stir the drink. We acclaim all the big guys who take the bows but it is the little guy more often than not who comes up with the ideas.
Steven Jobs is now ailing but he set the whole computer industry on its head. Bill Gates, who was an enterprising guy, essentially stole the software that became Microsoft from other little guys who didn't appreciate what they had, as Jobs stole from Xerox when they didn't know what they had.
Then there is Karry Mullis, the chemist who won the Nobel Prize in 1993 for discovering the "DNA fingerprint" that all the television CSI programs couldn't function without. Mullis was considered something of a flake and ripped off by his employer. I've written about all these people and related incidents in my books.
It is more difficult as a writer although you copyright all your stuff. In a way, you've just got to believe the world is going to be a little better place if others pick up one or two of your ideas and run with them.
Gibran wasn't around to protest Kennedy's use of his ideas. I'm not faulting JFK because he probably had no idea where the idea of "ask not" came from as he was not a reader, nor actually a writer. Some speech writer no doubt picked up the expression for the Kennedy Inaugural. True, JFK won the Pulitzer Prize for "Profiles in Courage," which however was written by Ted Sorensen, one of his acolytes.
Joe Kennedy to make sure "Profiles" became a best seller bought more than $100,000 worth of copies (more than $1 million in today's dollars) of the book around the nation's bookstores to give his son's book an early boost to best seller status. We buy books because they are best sellers just like we buy other products because they are advertised.
JFK, who was always a playboy and never a hard working senator, needed something like this book to give him national recognition. Joe Kennedy was nothing if not a good PR man. And so that is THE REST OF THE STORY.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 21, 2009
“The two most engaging powers of an author are, to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.”
Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1781), English author and lexicographer
“The most original authors are not so because they advance what is new, but because they put what they have to say as if it had never been said before.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 –1832), German poet, dramatist and philosopher
* * * * * *
When you are an idea guy, a reader of books, an observer of human behavior, and have the audacity to put your thoughts not only on paper, but in books, books that you often publish yourself for lack of name recognition, or even minor celebrity status, it is reassuring to hear one or more of your themes echoed in the words of our first African American president, Barak Obama.
President Obama urged Americans "to grow up." That has been a theme of mine, blatantly so; I might add, in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), THE WORKER, ALONE! (1995), TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996), SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998), CORPORATE SIN (2000) and A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007).
In my book, "Taboo," I chose the Thomas Paine essay that President Obama referenced General George Washington had read to his troops at a low point in the Revolutionary War, in concluding the book in the Afterword.
The whole theme of "Taboo" was Americans reluctance to grow up, and the consequences of not growing up. Many themes in that book are now prophetic; many others are far more exaggerated today instead of ameliorated. I thought I was being provocative, but I underestimated our capacity for self-indulgence and immaturity. If anything, we have slipped into early childhood, and wonder at our fate.
Celebrated columnist George Will writes eloquently today about president Obama's words that "The Time has come to set aside childish things." Of course, the president quoted from scripture, not from me, but my wonder is -- will it register?
I have described the American worker, which is most of us, in my writing as suspended in terminal adolescence in learned helplessness and arrested development counter dependent on our employers for our total well being.
I have further charged that management has been our surrogate parent and permanent baby-sitter, and that we have sacrificed control of our destiny for security, that we have given up freedom for comfort. As a consequence, we have become a complacent society.
We don't like to hear words such as these. We're optimists. Pessimism is a dirty word. We're told we have a bad attitude if we remind ourselves of our collective shortcomings. We even believe self-esteem is something you can purchase like a product, not something you have to earn by doing something worthwhile. Next to the bible more diet books are purchased than any other, people believing that diet is a formula and not a choice, as is also goodness. But I wander.
My writings (including postings on my website) are not themes to win friends and influence people. They are wake up calls of a sleepwalking nation in rote obedience to its nostalgia.
The irony is that workers everywhere have been telling me the things I write about but have always been afraid to be identified with for fear of hurting their careers or livelihood. I'll accept that. I've never had such fear and my career reflects it -- I should say "careers" as I've been in many kettles of fish.
My position is that these are themes that someone has to articulate sometime in some way or one day there won't be a time to contemplate them at all. It is nice to see President Obama is cognizant of and committed to addressing such basic or fundamental issues.
If you think I am trying to pat myself on the back, you have it all wrong. I accept the fact that I'm not read, that I'm an unknown, but it does rile me a bit that some famous people are given credit for saying things that they have taken from others.
This "growing up theme" has been much referenced since yesterday on PBS, the BBC, C-SPAN, and the German Television News, along with columns in local and national newspapers.
More than forty years ago, there was that famous line by president John F. Kennedy at his inaugural: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."
I had read that exact quote in a book of Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese poet, in the late 1950s. Gibran had actually used that expression in addressing his own Lebanese people in the 1920s, or forty years before Kennedy had said it.
Thomas Paine is mentioned today as being the source of General Washington's remark in 1776, but I've never seen a single mention of Kahlil Gibran's acknowledgment as the originator of Kennedy's famous line.
My BB just raises an eyebrow when I mention these things, and says, "How's your novel coming?"
Well, she knows it is not coming at all because I'm not working on it, but working on a couple books that, too, are unlikely to be read should they be published. You can imagine how I exasperate her sometimes.
One day I read a piece and told BB, "This guy can really write."
She said, "I knew you'd say that."
"Why?" I asked.
"You wrote it."
And by golly I had, but the author of the piece didn't give me any credit that I had.
Dr. Donald Farr has written before about plagiarism, and he is right, people do take from others, and they get away with it, too. When you are so small to be insignificant, there is not much you can do about it.
Given as I am to going off on tangents, I leave you with this. Some time ago, a young man who liked to work with his hands, but was left handed and couldn't find a suitable wrench for his work, invented a "left-handed-wrench."
This is where it gets interesting. He went to the main office of Sears and presented a copy of his wrench along with the plans for its construction. A Sears’s executive said they would "take it under advisement" and get back to him.
When they didn't, he returned to Sears and asked the status. "Oh, you didn't know? It was reviewed and found not feasible or commercially viable." He was given back the wrench and his plans without any further ado.
More than a year later, he was skimming a Sears’s catalogue, and came across the offer of a left-handed wrench, a wrench that looked suspiciously like his. He ordered it, and upon receipt of it, found it was identical to his.
Unbeknown to Sears, apparently thinking he was just a muck who knew no better, and would be intimidated by "corpocracy" and its giant corporate monarchy, he had, in the interim, successfully patented the wrench.
With no money, but patent, and Sears's wrench in hand, he found lawyers all over town that wanted to represent him. He settled with Sears for more than $5 million.
I mention this because it is little people that often stir the drink. We acclaim all the big guys who take the bows but it is the little guy more often than not who comes up with the ideas.
Steven Jobs is now ailing but he set the whole computer industry on its head. Bill Gates, who was an enterprising guy, essentially stole the software that became Microsoft from other little guys who didn't appreciate what they had, as Jobs stole from Xerox when they didn't know what they had.
Then there is Karry Mullis, the chemist who won the Nobel Prize in 1993 for discovering the "DNA fingerprint" that all the television CSI programs couldn't function without. Mullis was considered something of a flake and ripped off by his employer. I've written about all these people and related incidents in my books.
It is more difficult as a writer although you copyright all your stuff. In a way, you've just got to believe the world is going to be a little better place if others pick up one or two of your ideas and run with them.
Gibran wasn't around to protest Kennedy's use of his ideas. I'm not faulting JFK because he probably had no idea where the idea of "ask not" came from as he was not a reader, nor actually a writer. Some speech writer no doubt picked up the expression for the Kennedy Inaugural. True, JFK won the Pulitzer Prize for "Profiles in Courage," which however was written by Ted Sorensen, one of his acolytes.
Joe Kennedy to make sure "Profiles" became a best seller bought more than $100,000 worth of copies (more than $1 million in today's dollars) of the book around the nation's bookstores to give his son's book an early boost to best seller status. We buy books because they are best sellers just like we buy other products because they are advertised.
JFK, who was always a playboy and never a hard working senator, needed something like this book to give him national recognition. Joe Kennedy was nothing if not a good PR man. And so that is THE REST OF THE STORY.
Be always well,
Jim
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
EQUALITY IN FACT FOLLOWS EQUALITY IN MIND!
EQUALITY IN FACT FOLLOWS EQUALITY IN MIND!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 20, 2009
Inauguration Day of 44th President of the United States,
Barak Obama
“The equality of conditions is more complete in the Christian countries of the present day, than it has been at any time, or in any part of the world. Its gradual development is a providential fact, and it possesses all the characteristics of a divine decree; it is universal, it is durable, and it constantly eludes all human interference; and all events as well as all men, contribute to its progress.”
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859), French statesman from DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA (1840)
Reference: This is from an African American friend I've known and worked with as a consultant for nearly twenty years. He is an outstanding community leader, and a tribute to the Tampa Bay Community.
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
Thanks for keeping me on your contact list.
Today, I, along with the world, will feel a wealth of emotions as Barack Obama is sworn in as our 44th President of United States.
Earlier this evening I read your comments about what this moment means to little black boys and girls. My memory goes back to the early 1960's when my mother took me to join a Cub Scout Pack at a local church a few blocks from my neighborhood home. I recall a conversation she had with a white leader of the pack who told her that her son could not join the pack because it was only for white boys. We have come a long way as a nation and society and I wish my Mom were here physically to see him sworn in and rejoice in his election. I trust that she, my father and others who fought so hard are celebrating in heaven, as we are on earth.
I hold no hard feelings toward those who denied me the opportunity to join that Cub Scout pack that night. Soon after that event other doors were opened that were even more welcoming to me and others of different ethnic backgrounds. God is good!
Barack Obama is one person. He has the opportunity to make a difference, but it will take all of us to turn this ship around and head it in the right direction for our nation to succeed and rise to prominence again. And yes, we can do it.
Best regards,
Buddy
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Buddy,
I am sorry your parents didn't live to see this moment, but I'm glad we both did. God Bless President Barak Obama, and God Bless America!
Always be well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 20, 2009
Inauguration Day of 44th President of the United States,
Barak Obama
“The equality of conditions is more complete in the Christian countries of the present day, than it has been at any time, or in any part of the world. Its gradual development is a providential fact, and it possesses all the characteristics of a divine decree; it is universal, it is durable, and it constantly eludes all human interference; and all events as well as all men, contribute to its progress.”
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859), French statesman from DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA (1840)
Reference: This is from an African American friend I've known and worked with as a consultant for nearly twenty years. He is an outstanding community leader, and a tribute to the Tampa Bay Community.
A WRITER WRITES:
Jim,
Thanks for keeping me on your contact list.
Today, I, along with the world, will feel a wealth of emotions as Barack Obama is sworn in as our 44th President of United States.
Earlier this evening I read your comments about what this moment means to little black boys and girls. My memory goes back to the early 1960's when my mother took me to join a Cub Scout Pack at a local church a few blocks from my neighborhood home. I recall a conversation she had with a white leader of the pack who told her that her son could not join the pack because it was only for white boys. We have come a long way as a nation and society and I wish my Mom were here physically to see him sworn in and rejoice in his election. I trust that she, my father and others who fought so hard are celebrating in heaven, as we are on earth.
I hold no hard feelings toward those who denied me the opportunity to join that Cub Scout pack that night. Soon after that event other doors were opened that were even more welcoming to me and others of different ethnic backgrounds. God is good!
Barack Obama is one person. He has the opportunity to make a difference, but it will take all of us to turn this ship around and head it in the right direction for our nation to succeed and rise to prominence again. And yes, we can do it.
Best regards,
Buddy
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Buddy,
I am sorry your parents didn't live to see this moment, but I'm glad we both did. God Bless President Barak Obama, and God Bless America!
Always be well,
Jim
Monday, January 19, 2009
COMMENTS FROM A READER -- "WHEN THE BRITISH SPEAK, EUROPE CRINGES!"
COMMENTS FROM A READER ON --- “WHEN THE BRITISH SPEAK, EUROPE CRINGES!”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 19, 2009
“Learning makes a man fit company for himself.”
Edward Young (1683 – 1765), English poet
* * * * * *
A READER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
Thanks for forwarding the article. As an FYI, Peter is Christopher's younger (2 years) brother. As with many siblings, they fall out and reconcile. I was surprised by your reference to Christopher as far left. I have read his columns reacting with satisfaction and disgust. While he labels himself a democratic socialist, I think the description democratic antagonist would fit better. He seems to attack any line of thought that appears to be gaining popularity. A recent column resurfaced his long-held dislike of the Clintons. He doesn't like organized religion, welfare and many other things. He did seem to praise Obama in one column. Although, now I wonder if that was a tweak to his brother.
I hope the title of Peter Hitchens' column was sincere and he is waving goodbye content to no longer pile on snide criticism of our culture and behavior. Revolution, a concept unknown to the country of pampered royalty and a house of peerage, is necessary for dramatic change. There is no easy path to overthrowing pomposity and arrogance. It requires a slap in the face and maybe even a bloody nose. The election was a slap in the face for the status quo. "The People" have been emboldened to treat all vestiges of power - CEOs, Unions, corrupt politicians (Stevens, Blago, et the invetable al), with a new you-are-us-so-act-like-it attitude.
I am aware that hereditary membership in the House of Lords was partially eliminated (save 90 or so Lords) in 1999. Polite, ineffective revolution. How British. 40 million pounds to have a queen. 176 million to sustain a monarchy. Change you can relieve on. Now, we have our own "....hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God." At least he will work for us.
There is something bothersome about the hoopla over this election. I voted for Obama because he was not Bush, McCain or any other puppet of the New World Order that the Republicans could have thrown at us. Plus, he had a sincere concern for America's success as opposed to a desire to protect the oil profits of Middle East elites and the petro-corpocracy. The man, if he is misleading us, is walking a loose high wire. I believe we are entering a period of palpable impatience for leaders who mislead. I appreciate and understand the exuberance of black Americans. The confluence of the inauguration with the MLK holiday heightens our reflection on the journey that brings us to this point. What is important to remember is that it was not only black people who made this journey. The cost of the journey, suffering through segregation, bias, discrimination, misrepresentation, and outright hate, far exceeded that of those from the dominant white culture who actively joined in the ideological and sometimes physical battle for racial equality. One would think, from the media treatment of this event, that whites had nothing invested in the decades-long transition. Nor do their impressions of this historic event matter.
Maybe I am missing the larger point. Cook County is not a microcosm of America. Over 900 sq. mi., with 5.3 million people it is second to Los Angeles County in population. 1.4 million are black, proportionately twice the US proportion, and the largest African-American voting bloc in any county in the US. This is reflected in Chicago and Cook County government. Here, color and ethnicity are ho-hum criteria. What is the significance of Obama's election to liberal white America? And, who is reporting that? I know what I read on the neo-con websites. Those people don't hate him because he's black. They hate his liberalism. What is the political source of our enthusiasm? This may be the real source of Mr. Hitchens' angst over the future of America. Will we stop proudly looking in the mirror, admiring the moral maturity of our recent decision? Will we recognize that self-improvement, if not used to create a better world, is reduced to smugness? I believe the answer is yes and it fills me with excitement and anticipation.
Peace and wonder,
Michael
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
It is such a delight to read you. I always learn something new and important, something that improves my perspective, and relieves me somewhat of my angst. This is such an occasion.
I would hope, however, that the “White Nation” of Americans would endeavor to understand how incredibly significant the election of President Barak Obama is to little black boys and little black girls across not only the United States of America, but throughout the world.
The perspective of South Africa, and the experience of apartheid, where I witnessed a great society built on the backs of brown and black people, including indentured workers from India, introduced me to myself. It was there, you may recall, that Mohandas Ghandhi launched his civil rights movement of ahimsa, or total non-violence in quest for India’s independence from tyrannical Great Britain.
Today, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is honored, the man who led the American Negro Civil Rights Movement with what he had learned from Ghandi. It is not mere rhetoric to suggest tomorrow is the beginning of the answer to Dr. King’s “I have a dream.”
When I was a young impressionistic student at the University of Iowa more than fifty years ago, I read Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” It gave me chills reading it, then, not knowing that I would one day experience the world of Mr. Kurtz, the manager of the Inner Station of the Belgian Congo, as an executive for Nalco Chemical Company of Chicago, Illinois, operating out of Johannesburg.
It was as a university student, still a teenager, that I was introduced to the power of culture to strip a man of his false pride and ideals and expose him to the reality of his ways and the world in which he lived. That introduction took on reality when I was assigned to South Africa. The naïve idealist with ambition beyond measure was never the same after South Africa.
When I took my first college psychology courses, as a chemistry major, and as electives not as my major, I learned of experiments where students in simulated studies exacted simulated torture on people not knowing they were exposing their primordial instincts. Erich Fromm wrote insightfully of this in “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness” (1973).
Michael, we live in a cruel and violent world, a world in which people of the pen have a responsibility to enlighten not enrage, to educate not egg us on to our basic instincts.
Yes, a lot of people are hurting today with the subprime meltdown, yet according to 2007 figures, 1.9 percent of American households earn $250,000 or more; 20 percent $100,000 or more; the median income per household is $50,223; and 96 percent of Americans (now 93 percent, 2008 figures) are gainfully employed. In Florida, because of the large retirement population, the median income per household is $46,142. Against this reality, President Barak Obama has to deal with the $1.35 trillion tax cut of president Bush, which expires in 2011. God only knows what his stimulus package will add to this.
We have done something right against many things wrong to grow to such economic strength. We cannot rest on our laurels nor should we panic. Will their be genuine change? History tells us “no,” but we have not been where we are now since the Civil War. We are still a young and upstart nation that refuges to grow up. Perhaps that is one of our strengths, which of course is the antithesis of my argument. We shall see.
What I don’t like about the Hitchens, whom I now know are a pair, is their bottom feeding. Christopher Hitchens attacked one of my philosophical heroes, Isaiah Berlin, and for that I’ve never forgiven him. He took several cheap shots saying he should have done more for Israel, when a philosopher is a thinker, not a doer. Speaking of which, I may be a provocateur but I don’t see myself as a polemicist, which is how I see the Hitchens. I’m sorry, Michael, they bring out my worst, while you bring out my best.
Thank you for educating me.
And always be well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 19, 2009
“Learning makes a man fit company for himself.”
Edward Young (1683 – 1765), English poet
* * * * * *
A READER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
Thanks for forwarding the article. As an FYI, Peter is Christopher's younger (2 years) brother. As with many siblings, they fall out and reconcile. I was surprised by your reference to Christopher as far left. I have read his columns reacting with satisfaction and disgust. While he labels himself a democratic socialist, I think the description democratic antagonist would fit better. He seems to attack any line of thought that appears to be gaining popularity. A recent column resurfaced his long-held dislike of the Clintons. He doesn't like organized religion, welfare and many other things. He did seem to praise Obama in one column. Although, now I wonder if that was a tweak to his brother.
I hope the title of Peter Hitchens' column was sincere and he is waving goodbye content to no longer pile on snide criticism of our culture and behavior. Revolution, a concept unknown to the country of pampered royalty and a house of peerage, is necessary for dramatic change. There is no easy path to overthrowing pomposity and arrogance. It requires a slap in the face and maybe even a bloody nose. The election was a slap in the face for the status quo. "The People" have been emboldened to treat all vestiges of power - CEOs, Unions, corrupt politicians (Stevens, Blago, et the invetable al), with a new you-are-us-so-act-like-it attitude.
I am aware that hereditary membership in the House of Lords was partially eliminated (save 90 or so Lords) in 1999. Polite, ineffective revolution. How British. 40 million pounds to have a queen. 176 million to sustain a monarchy. Change you can relieve on. Now, we have our own "....hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God." At least he will work for us.
There is something bothersome about the hoopla over this election. I voted for Obama because he was not Bush, McCain or any other puppet of the New World Order that the Republicans could have thrown at us. Plus, he had a sincere concern for America's success as opposed to a desire to protect the oil profits of Middle East elites and the petro-corpocracy. The man, if he is misleading us, is walking a loose high wire. I believe we are entering a period of palpable impatience for leaders who mislead. I appreciate and understand the exuberance of black Americans. The confluence of the inauguration with the MLK holiday heightens our reflection on the journey that brings us to this point. What is important to remember is that it was not only black people who made this journey. The cost of the journey, suffering through segregation, bias, discrimination, misrepresentation, and outright hate, far exceeded that of those from the dominant white culture who actively joined in the ideological and sometimes physical battle for racial equality. One would think, from the media treatment of this event, that whites had nothing invested in the decades-long transition. Nor do their impressions of this historic event matter.
Maybe I am missing the larger point. Cook County is not a microcosm of America. Over 900 sq. mi., with 5.3 million people it is second to Los Angeles County in population. 1.4 million are black, proportionately twice the US proportion, and the largest African-American voting bloc in any county in the US. This is reflected in Chicago and Cook County government. Here, color and ethnicity are ho-hum criteria. What is the significance of Obama's election to liberal white America? And, who is reporting that? I know what I read on the neo-con websites. Those people don't hate him because he's black. They hate his liberalism. What is the political source of our enthusiasm? This may be the real source of Mr. Hitchens' angst over the future of America. Will we stop proudly looking in the mirror, admiring the moral maturity of our recent decision? Will we recognize that self-improvement, if not used to create a better world, is reduced to smugness? I believe the answer is yes and it fills me with excitement and anticipation.
Peace and wonder,
Michael
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
It is such a delight to read you. I always learn something new and important, something that improves my perspective, and relieves me somewhat of my angst. This is such an occasion.
I would hope, however, that the “White Nation” of Americans would endeavor to understand how incredibly significant the election of President Barak Obama is to little black boys and little black girls across not only the United States of America, but throughout the world.
The perspective of South Africa, and the experience of apartheid, where I witnessed a great society built on the backs of brown and black people, including indentured workers from India, introduced me to myself. It was there, you may recall, that Mohandas Ghandhi launched his civil rights movement of ahimsa, or total non-violence in quest for India’s independence from tyrannical Great Britain.
Today, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is honored, the man who led the American Negro Civil Rights Movement with what he had learned from Ghandi. It is not mere rhetoric to suggest tomorrow is the beginning of the answer to Dr. King’s “I have a dream.”
When I was a young impressionistic student at the University of Iowa more than fifty years ago, I read Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” It gave me chills reading it, then, not knowing that I would one day experience the world of Mr. Kurtz, the manager of the Inner Station of the Belgian Congo, as an executive for Nalco Chemical Company of Chicago, Illinois, operating out of Johannesburg.
It was as a university student, still a teenager, that I was introduced to the power of culture to strip a man of his false pride and ideals and expose him to the reality of his ways and the world in which he lived. That introduction took on reality when I was assigned to South Africa. The naïve idealist with ambition beyond measure was never the same after South Africa.
When I took my first college psychology courses, as a chemistry major, and as electives not as my major, I learned of experiments where students in simulated studies exacted simulated torture on people not knowing they were exposing their primordial instincts. Erich Fromm wrote insightfully of this in “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness” (1973).
Michael, we live in a cruel and violent world, a world in which people of the pen have a responsibility to enlighten not enrage, to educate not egg us on to our basic instincts.
Yes, a lot of people are hurting today with the subprime meltdown, yet according to 2007 figures, 1.9 percent of American households earn $250,000 or more; 20 percent $100,000 or more; the median income per household is $50,223; and 96 percent of Americans (now 93 percent, 2008 figures) are gainfully employed. In Florida, because of the large retirement population, the median income per household is $46,142. Against this reality, President Barak Obama has to deal with the $1.35 trillion tax cut of president Bush, which expires in 2011. God only knows what his stimulus package will add to this.
We have done something right against many things wrong to grow to such economic strength. We cannot rest on our laurels nor should we panic. Will their be genuine change? History tells us “no,” but we have not been where we are now since the Civil War. We are still a young and upstart nation that refuges to grow up. Perhaps that is one of our strengths, which of course is the antithesis of my argument. We shall see.
What I don’t like about the Hitchens, whom I now know are a pair, is their bottom feeding. Christopher Hitchens attacked one of my philosophical heroes, Isaiah Berlin, and for that I’ve never forgiven him. He took several cheap shots saying he should have done more for Israel, when a philosopher is a thinker, not a doer. Speaking of which, I may be a provocateur but I don’t see myself as a polemicist, which is how I see the Hitchens. I’m sorry, Michael, they bring out my worst, while you bring out my best.
Thank you for educating me.
And always be well,
Jim
WHEN THE BRITISH SPEAK, EUROPE CRINGES!
WHEN THE BRITISH SPEAK, EUROPE CRINGES!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 19, 2009
“This is the excellent foppery of the world! That, when we are sick in fortune, we make guilty of our disasters, the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity; fools, by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting.”
Shakespeare
* * * * * *
A READER WRITES (ATTACHING AN ARTICLE BY A BRITISH JOURNALIST)
Jim,
This guy writes almost as well as you do. Care to comment?
Phil
PS This is a very telling article from a British journalist. This is some insight into what the world thinks of our politics here in the US. All I can say is WOW! What follows is an interesting article written for the London Daily Mail by Peter Hitchens, a famous British author and journalist, and interestingly a political independent. We certainly don't manage our affairs in the US in accordance with Brit opinion, but it's always a good idea to know of the opinion of others previously proven of merit; he prompts valid questions of both liberals and conservatives.
He was in the USA on election night and wrote of his impressions. Like him or laugh at him, Hitchens remains popular throughout the world because many citizens of the globe think as he does. Some of you will nod your heads in agreement as you read it; others will frown; and still others will do both. Let's all hope that Mr. Hitchens' "wave goodbye to America" is premature.
THE ARTICLE:
THE NIGHT WE WAVED GOODBYE TO AMERICA
© Peter Hitchens, London Daily Mail, November 10, 2008
Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernize Heaven and Hell - or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.
The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilization. At least Mandela-worship - its nearest equivalent - is focused on a man who actually did something. I really don't see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one, which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to
facts.
It already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers, which recorded Obama’s victory, have become valuable relics. You may buy Obama picture books, and Obama calendars, and if there isn't yet a children's picture version of his story, there soon will be. Proper books, recording his sordid associates, his cowardly voting record, his astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted abortion and his blundering trip to Africa, are little-read and hard to find.
If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left wing machine politician is a sort of secular savior, then you can believe anything. He plainly doesn't believe it himself. His cliché-stuffed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves. It was what you would expect from someone who knew he'd promised too much and that from now on the easy bit was over.
He needn't worry too much. From now on, the rough boys and girls of America 's Democratic Party apparatus, many recycled from Bill Clinton's stained and crumpled entourage, will crowd round him, to collect the rich spoils of his victory and also tell him what to do, which is what he is used to.
Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan He really did talk about a 'new dawn', and a 'timeless creed' (which was 'yes, we can'). He proclaimed that 'change has come'. He revealed that, despite having edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn't know what 'enormity' means. He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr. Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was it the ark of history?) and bending it once more > toward the hope of a better day (Don't try this at home!).
I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jackson sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with this sort of stuff.
And it was interesting how the President-elect failed to lift his admiring audience by repeated - but rather hesitant - invocations of the brainless slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt against his will - 'Yes, we can'. They were supposed to thunder 'Yes, we can!' back at him, but they just wouldn't join in. No wonder. Yes we can what exactly? Go home and keep a close eye on the tax rate, is my advice. He'd have been better off bursting into 'I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony' which contains roughly the same message and might have attracted some valuable commercial sponsorship.
Perhaps, being a Chicago crowd, they knew some of the things that 52.5 per cent of America prefers not to know. They know Obama is the obedient servant of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political machines in America. They know that one of his alarmingly close associates, a state-subsidized slum landlord called Tony Rezko, has been convicted on fraud and corruption charges.
They also know the US is just as segregated as it was before Martin Luther King - in schools, streets, neighborhoods, holidays, even in its TV-watching habits and its choice of fast-food joints. The difference is that it is now done by unspoken agreement rather than by law.
If Mr. Obama's election had threatened any of that, his feel-good white supporters would have scuttled off and voted for John McCain, or practically anyone. But it doesn't. Mr. Obama, thanks mainly to the now-departed grandmother he alternately praised as a saint and denounced as a racial bigot, has the huge advantages of an expensive private education. He did not have to grow up in the badlands of useless schools, shattered families and gangs that are the lots of so many young black men of his generation.
If the nonsensical claims made for this election were true, then every positive discrimination program aimed at helping black people into jobs they otherwise wouldn't get should be abandoned forthwith. Nothing of the kind will happen. On the contrary, there will probably be more of them. And if those who voted for Obama were all proving their anti-racist nobility, that presumably means that those many millions who didn't vote for him were proving themselves to be hopeless bigots. This is obviously untrue.
I was in Washington, DC the night of the election. America 's beautiful capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in the world, with 15th Street - which runs due north from the White House - the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of America, it also now has a new division, and one, which is in many ways much more important.
I had attended an election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan. As I walked, I crossed another of Washington 's secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.
They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.
Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique. These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America 's conservative party - the Republicans - to fight on the cultural and moral fronts. They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Phil,
It has always intrigued me that Great Britain, which doesn’t have an economy to match California, and doesn’t have enough wind to blow down a paper hut, can still stand above the fray with the delusional stance of superiority when the British currency and “The Royal Crown” represent an anachronistic breach with the Continent. To think the Brits speak for Europe is beyond delusional as the Continent is more than the English Channel away.
Shakespeare understood this predilection (see quotation above) and made swift cant of it, which is to say, the British are long on style and short on substance. They talk good but they don’t walk the talk too well.
I should say at the outset I'm no great admirer of the British. I've seen what they have done to native people about the globe. I don't know if Peter Hitchens is related to Christopher Hitchens who is of the far left, and quite a critic of the United States. Yet, C. Hitchens seems to be such an admirer of the United States that he became an American citizen. Certain Americans seem to love these Brits who appeal to their collective masochism. Now, that is what is sad.
As for a diatribe against president-elect Barak Obama, I say let's give him a chance. It is ironic and may prove prophetic that he has more than a symbolic connection to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had no administrative experience when he became President, and his military experience consisted of a captaincy in the Black Hawk War, in which he never saw any live combat fighting Indians.
As we all know, Lincoln proved himself a sound strategist against the enemy as well as against his own generals, who were pathetic until that man from Galena, Illinois, Ulysses S. Grant took over.
Lincoln suffered through the hesitations of General George McClellan, which for me was so painful and frustrating to read a century and a half later that I'd have rung the arrogant bastards neck. Lincoln, who always had a way with words, once said about McClellan that sending reinforcements was like shoving fleas across a barnyard so few of them seemed to get there.
Not to dwell on Lincoln's attributes, but Obama enters a dual war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and will be severely tested by the established military as well as established voices in Congress, as was Lincoln. The Great Emancipator suffered through another incompetent in general Joe Hooker, who wanted to set up a military dictatorship under the nose of the novice president. Lincoln, like Obama eloquent beyond measure with a rare intelligence schooled as an outsider, flung a challenge at Hooker:
"Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship."
I have written much about leadership over the years, and I have always smiled to myself when I’ve thought about such men as Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson. They weren't programmed with polite manners and pecking order politics. They were programmed to life and survival of the fittest. Struggle and pain was the oxygen of their existence.
They both made mistakes, both were vilified for being too one-sided or too hard. Both were called tyrants for suspending habeas corpus and imprisoning dissidents, but both never took their eye off the ball of what was important and what was not.
Each was his own man. Jackson was totally a man of action. Lincoln was a man of eloquence who knew how to use action. Lincoln's answer to his accusers of being a tyrant was magnificent:
"I expect to maintain this contest (Civil War) until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress, or the country forsake me."
Beyond the triumphs of his leadership, Lincoln retained a special genius, not of strategy, although he was a great strategist, not even of politics, although he was a consummate politician barring none, but the genius of being a person, a tall, gaunt and melancholy man, who kept his own counsel because he had a moral center and a working compass that never failed him in his all too short journey in life.
This country needed an outsider, then, someone who had endured and triumphed over the duplicity, the chicanery, the hypocrisy of a people out of touch with the times, itself and the world which was moving away from it. Lincoln's time was not unlike ours. Is Barak Obama that man? We shall see.
Lincoln said, "In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free." To him, the American cause was "to elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit of all." Nearly two centuries later, we are in that dawn.
I am currently writing a book titled CONFIDENT THINKING attempting to take some measure of our times and wider issues. I feel we have lost something possibly now found. We shall see. This is an excerpt from the book:
* * * * * *
EXCERPT from CONFIDENT THINKING:
Change is the God of The Machine. There isn't an institution that doesn't deaden if not kill our spirit because of the constant cacophony of its perpetual motion. There is no place or time for our inner world. The Machine in me says, when I have a pain, "It hurts," not that, "I hurt." Yet, when I express happiness, I say, "I am happy," not that, "It is happy." When I am depressed, I say, "I am gloomy," not that, "It is gloomy." We leave The Machine behind when it comes to feelings. My wonder, are we afraid to feel?
Feelings, like perceptions, are intentional. Perception, as Colin Wilson puts it, is a sculptor, a molder of reality. We leave the conformist, the pleaser, driven by The Machine, and take charge. But alas, how rare taking charge is.
The Machine is our left-brain or cognitive mind. It not only dominates our world, but also is obsessed with a personal world when it is the impersonal world, or right brain thinking, that gets beyond our one-dimensional existence. This sounds bleak but it is because we confuse the impersonal with left-brain or objective value-free analysis. Colin Wilson writes in "Access to Inner Worlds" (1983):
"Intelligence has developed in association with the need for alertness, for scanning the external world for problems and threats. In short, intelligence sprang from a sense of urgency. And now the urgency has diminished, and man can afford to relax and enjoy this magnificent civilization he has created, he finds it impossible to escape the old sense of urgency."
James Hillman describes this in "A Terrible Love of War" (2004), as sponsoring an impossible collection of murder and soldierly comradeship, torture and religious conviction, the destruction of earth and patriotism, annihilation of enemies and a passion for hope, all of which makes war a normal expression of the collective conscience.
The Machine would argue, what about 9/11, what about Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, China? What about the Great Depression of 2008? What about the global meltdown caused by the subprime real estate debacle? What about the genocide in the Republic of the Congo, Darfur, Somalia, and Rwanda? What about all these developments? What choice do we have?
The Machine fails to see it is programmed to be solution driven, not problem directed. It keeps generating answers and storing them in its archives too preoccupied to anticipate and deal with problems before they become "urgencies."
These urgencies are all outcomes of neglected processes. We are stuck because we have stayed the same as long as we could, missed the changes too preoccupied to notice, preferred to describe, debate and dissolve our problems in hesitation rhetoric than to face them, and then we have left the future up for grabs to be resolved with crisis management, which is always too little too late.
Self-contentment is anathema to progress. With self-contentment, there is a fullness of the spirit, which knows no feeling of want or poverty. It is in a happy marriage with nature, and uses the knowledge of its inner world to connect first with itself and then with others. We are never alone when we are "al one ness."
Loneliness is the empty world of constant seeking of outside reassurance. It is a violent disruptive world, a world that needs change for change's sake, seldom considering what is lost for what is gained. Nothing can be left undone, as there is a constant drive to escape the "central ego," the citadel of the quiet.
Wheeling from this, the reader says, "But you mix the single (individual) with the collective (society), the particular with the general; they are not the same." Oh, but they are, indeed, they are!
Anxiety spreads like the wind from one to the many, to everyone. Why else would generation after generation call its age, "The Age of Anxiety"? And why is this? It is the fault of our programming.
Modern Man's intelligence and sense of urgency created the modern world so that he could afford to relax and enjoy the magnificent civilization he has created, only to find it impossible to escape the old sense of urgency.
Human evolution has trained him for action, neither for thought nor peace, but for aggression. This has wrapped him in paradox. Confused, he has become passive and delusional with breakout patterns of fast cars, fast women, and profligate lifestyles as compensation for a self-image of being lost, mediocre and accidental. The wild beast to conquer is not "out there" but "inside."
Modern Man is like the man in Colin Wilson's metaphor in "Access to Inner Words." We find this man living out on the lawn in a tent, while building a magnificent house. Once completed, he absent-mindedly continues to live in the tent and leaves the house empty. He simply cannot overcome his programming.
That is what Modern Man has done. He has created a climate to relax but has never found the time or inclination. Indeed, he runs faster and faster. This is not a recent development.
Budd Schulberg captured this frightening mania in "What Makes Sammy Run" (1941) over a half century ago. The novel is the story of Sammy Glick who fought his way from New York's lower east side, over the bodies of his friends and mistresses to the top of the heap in Hollywood, and he could never stop running. It is a twentieth century novel but it describes the twenty-first century man to a tee, who is afraid to stop to find out who he is or why he is for fear he will lose his place in the race for good.
Man-the-Machine is in perpetual motion like the guy who has been driving all day, and who keeps waking up at night, imagining himself still behind the wheel. He is the lonely hunter uncertain of his prey. Consequently, Man-the-Machine has slipped into the insidious habit of anxiety, tension, over-alertness, and always being on, craving connection to fill a void that only exists because he is afraid to stop.
Some reading this may declare that they take care of themselves physically, earn a living, build a business or profession, manage a family and otherwise conduct themselves with much success in public and private affairs, so who's to say I'm not in control?
* * * * * *
Reading this, you can understand why Lincoln and Jackson, and now Obama are on my radar.
CONFIDENT THINKING, should it get published, and there are no guarantees when someone writes because he must, and worries not at all about the publishing end until it is finished. My writing may seem too serious too intent and too contentious. It might be all of these. But I sense we are waiting for another 9/11 when the real danger is not material combustion but psychological and emotional implosion. If you read history, no nation or civilization has ever been destroyed from "without," but always "within."
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 19, 2009
“This is the excellent foppery of the world! That, when we are sick in fortune, we make guilty of our disasters, the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity; fools, by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting.”
Shakespeare
* * * * * *
A READER WRITES (ATTACHING AN ARTICLE BY A BRITISH JOURNALIST)
Jim,
This guy writes almost as well as you do. Care to comment?
Phil
PS This is a very telling article from a British journalist. This is some insight into what the world thinks of our politics here in the US. All I can say is WOW! What follows is an interesting article written for the London Daily Mail by Peter Hitchens, a famous British author and journalist, and interestingly a political independent. We certainly don't manage our affairs in the US in accordance with Brit opinion, but it's always a good idea to know of the opinion of others previously proven of merit; he prompts valid questions of both liberals and conservatives.
He was in the USA on election night and wrote of his impressions. Like him or laugh at him, Hitchens remains popular throughout the world because many citizens of the globe think as he does. Some of you will nod your heads in agreement as you read it; others will frown; and still others will do both. Let's all hope that Mr. Hitchens' "wave goodbye to America" is premature.
THE ARTICLE:
THE NIGHT WE WAVED GOODBYE TO AMERICA
© Peter Hitchens, London Daily Mail, November 10, 2008
Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernize Heaven and Hell - or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.
The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilization. At least Mandela-worship - its nearest equivalent - is focused on a man who actually did something. I really don't see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one, which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to
facts.
It already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers, which recorded Obama’s victory, have become valuable relics. You may buy Obama picture books, and Obama calendars, and if there isn't yet a children's picture version of his story, there soon will be. Proper books, recording his sordid associates, his cowardly voting record, his astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted abortion and his blundering trip to Africa, are little-read and hard to find.
If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left wing machine politician is a sort of secular savior, then you can believe anything. He plainly doesn't believe it himself. His cliché-stuffed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves. It was what you would expect from someone who knew he'd promised too much and that from now on the easy bit was over.
He needn't worry too much. From now on, the rough boys and girls of America 's Democratic Party apparatus, many recycled from Bill Clinton's stained and crumpled entourage, will crowd round him, to collect the rich spoils of his victory and also tell him what to do, which is what he is used to.
Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan He really did talk about a 'new dawn', and a 'timeless creed' (which was 'yes, we can'). He proclaimed that 'change has come'. He revealed that, despite having edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn't know what 'enormity' means. He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr. Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was it the ark of history?) and bending it once more > toward the hope of a better day (Don't try this at home!).
I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jackson sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with this sort of stuff.
And it was interesting how the President-elect failed to lift his admiring audience by repeated - but rather hesitant - invocations of the brainless slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt against his will - 'Yes, we can'. They were supposed to thunder 'Yes, we can!' back at him, but they just wouldn't join in. No wonder. Yes we can what exactly? Go home and keep a close eye on the tax rate, is my advice. He'd have been better off bursting into 'I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony' which contains roughly the same message and might have attracted some valuable commercial sponsorship.
Perhaps, being a Chicago crowd, they knew some of the things that 52.5 per cent of America prefers not to know. They know Obama is the obedient servant of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political machines in America. They know that one of his alarmingly close associates, a state-subsidized slum landlord called Tony Rezko, has been convicted on fraud and corruption charges.
They also know the US is just as segregated as it was before Martin Luther King - in schools, streets, neighborhoods, holidays, even in its TV-watching habits and its choice of fast-food joints. The difference is that it is now done by unspoken agreement rather than by law.
If Mr. Obama's election had threatened any of that, his feel-good white supporters would have scuttled off and voted for John McCain, or practically anyone. But it doesn't. Mr. Obama, thanks mainly to the now-departed grandmother he alternately praised as a saint and denounced as a racial bigot, has the huge advantages of an expensive private education. He did not have to grow up in the badlands of useless schools, shattered families and gangs that are the lots of so many young black men of his generation.
If the nonsensical claims made for this election were true, then every positive discrimination program aimed at helping black people into jobs they otherwise wouldn't get should be abandoned forthwith. Nothing of the kind will happen. On the contrary, there will probably be more of them. And if those who voted for Obama were all proving their anti-racist nobility, that presumably means that those many millions who didn't vote for him were proving themselves to be hopeless bigots. This is obviously untrue.
I was in Washington, DC the night of the election. America 's beautiful capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in the world, with 15th Street - which runs due north from the White House - the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of America, it also now has a new division, and one, which is in many ways much more important.
I had attended an election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan. As I walked, I crossed another of Washington 's secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.
They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.
Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique. These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America 's conservative party - the Republicans - to fight on the cultural and moral fronts. They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Phil,
It has always intrigued me that Great Britain, which doesn’t have an economy to match California, and doesn’t have enough wind to blow down a paper hut, can still stand above the fray with the delusional stance of superiority when the British currency and “The Royal Crown” represent an anachronistic breach with the Continent. To think the Brits speak for Europe is beyond delusional as the Continent is more than the English Channel away.
Shakespeare understood this predilection (see quotation above) and made swift cant of it, which is to say, the British are long on style and short on substance. They talk good but they don’t walk the talk too well.
I should say at the outset I'm no great admirer of the British. I've seen what they have done to native people about the globe. I don't know if Peter Hitchens is related to Christopher Hitchens who is of the far left, and quite a critic of the United States. Yet, C. Hitchens seems to be such an admirer of the United States that he became an American citizen. Certain Americans seem to love these Brits who appeal to their collective masochism. Now, that is what is sad.
As for a diatribe against president-elect Barak Obama, I say let's give him a chance. It is ironic and may prove prophetic that he has more than a symbolic connection to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had no administrative experience when he became President, and his military experience consisted of a captaincy in the Black Hawk War, in which he never saw any live combat fighting Indians.
As we all know, Lincoln proved himself a sound strategist against the enemy as well as against his own generals, who were pathetic until that man from Galena, Illinois, Ulysses S. Grant took over.
Lincoln suffered through the hesitations of General George McClellan, which for me was so painful and frustrating to read a century and a half later that I'd have rung the arrogant bastards neck. Lincoln, who always had a way with words, once said about McClellan that sending reinforcements was like shoving fleas across a barnyard so few of them seemed to get there.
Not to dwell on Lincoln's attributes, but Obama enters a dual war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and will be severely tested by the established military as well as established voices in Congress, as was Lincoln. The Great Emancipator suffered through another incompetent in general Joe Hooker, who wanted to set up a military dictatorship under the nose of the novice president. Lincoln, like Obama eloquent beyond measure with a rare intelligence schooled as an outsider, flung a challenge at Hooker:
"Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship."
I have written much about leadership over the years, and I have always smiled to myself when I’ve thought about such men as Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson. They weren't programmed with polite manners and pecking order politics. They were programmed to life and survival of the fittest. Struggle and pain was the oxygen of their existence.
They both made mistakes, both were vilified for being too one-sided or too hard. Both were called tyrants for suspending habeas corpus and imprisoning dissidents, but both never took their eye off the ball of what was important and what was not.
Each was his own man. Jackson was totally a man of action. Lincoln was a man of eloquence who knew how to use action. Lincoln's answer to his accusers of being a tyrant was magnificent:
"I expect to maintain this contest (Civil War) until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress, or the country forsake me."
Beyond the triumphs of his leadership, Lincoln retained a special genius, not of strategy, although he was a great strategist, not even of politics, although he was a consummate politician barring none, but the genius of being a person, a tall, gaunt and melancholy man, who kept his own counsel because he had a moral center and a working compass that never failed him in his all too short journey in life.
This country needed an outsider, then, someone who had endured and triumphed over the duplicity, the chicanery, the hypocrisy of a people out of touch with the times, itself and the world which was moving away from it. Lincoln's time was not unlike ours. Is Barak Obama that man? We shall see.
Lincoln said, "In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free." To him, the American cause was "to elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit of all." Nearly two centuries later, we are in that dawn.
I am currently writing a book titled CONFIDENT THINKING attempting to take some measure of our times and wider issues. I feel we have lost something possibly now found. We shall see. This is an excerpt from the book:
* * * * * *
EXCERPT from CONFIDENT THINKING:
Change is the God of The Machine. There isn't an institution that doesn't deaden if not kill our spirit because of the constant cacophony of its perpetual motion. There is no place or time for our inner world. The Machine in me says, when I have a pain, "It hurts," not that, "I hurt." Yet, when I express happiness, I say, "I am happy," not that, "It is happy." When I am depressed, I say, "I am gloomy," not that, "It is gloomy." We leave The Machine behind when it comes to feelings. My wonder, are we afraid to feel?
Feelings, like perceptions, are intentional. Perception, as Colin Wilson puts it, is a sculptor, a molder of reality. We leave the conformist, the pleaser, driven by The Machine, and take charge. But alas, how rare taking charge is.
The Machine is our left-brain or cognitive mind. It not only dominates our world, but also is obsessed with a personal world when it is the impersonal world, or right brain thinking, that gets beyond our one-dimensional existence. This sounds bleak but it is because we confuse the impersonal with left-brain or objective value-free analysis. Colin Wilson writes in "Access to Inner Worlds" (1983):
"Intelligence has developed in association with the need for alertness, for scanning the external world for problems and threats. In short, intelligence sprang from a sense of urgency. And now the urgency has diminished, and man can afford to relax and enjoy this magnificent civilization he has created, he finds it impossible to escape the old sense of urgency."
James Hillman describes this in "A Terrible Love of War" (2004), as sponsoring an impossible collection of murder and soldierly comradeship, torture and religious conviction, the destruction of earth and patriotism, annihilation of enemies and a passion for hope, all of which makes war a normal expression of the collective conscience.
The Machine would argue, what about 9/11, what about Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, China? What about the Great Depression of 2008? What about the global meltdown caused by the subprime real estate debacle? What about the genocide in the Republic of the Congo, Darfur, Somalia, and Rwanda? What about all these developments? What choice do we have?
The Machine fails to see it is programmed to be solution driven, not problem directed. It keeps generating answers and storing them in its archives too preoccupied to anticipate and deal with problems before they become "urgencies."
These urgencies are all outcomes of neglected processes. We are stuck because we have stayed the same as long as we could, missed the changes too preoccupied to notice, preferred to describe, debate and dissolve our problems in hesitation rhetoric than to face them, and then we have left the future up for grabs to be resolved with crisis management, which is always too little too late.
Self-contentment is anathema to progress. With self-contentment, there is a fullness of the spirit, which knows no feeling of want or poverty. It is in a happy marriage with nature, and uses the knowledge of its inner world to connect first with itself and then with others. We are never alone when we are "al one ness."
Loneliness is the empty world of constant seeking of outside reassurance. It is a violent disruptive world, a world that needs change for change's sake, seldom considering what is lost for what is gained. Nothing can be left undone, as there is a constant drive to escape the "central ego," the citadel of the quiet.
Wheeling from this, the reader says, "But you mix the single (individual) with the collective (society), the particular with the general; they are not the same." Oh, but they are, indeed, they are!
Anxiety spreads like the wind from one to the many, to everyone. Why else would generation after generation call its age, "The Age of Anxiety"? And why is this? It is the fault of our programming.
Modern Man's intelligence and sense of urgency created the modern world so that he could afford to relax and enjoy the magnificent civilization he has created, only to find it impossible to escape the old sense of urgency.
Human evolution has trained him for action, neither for thought nor peace, but for aggression. This has wrapped him in paradox. Confused, he has become passive and delusional with breakout patterns of fast cars, fast women, and profligate lifestyles as compensation for a self-image of being lost, mediocre and accidental. The wild beast to conquer is not "out there" but "inside."
Modern Man is like the man in Colin Wilson's metaphor in "Access to Inner Words." We find this man living out on the lawn in a tent, while building a magnificent house. Once completed, he absent-mindedly continues to live in the tent and leaves the house empty. He simply cannot overcome his programming.
That is what Modern Man has done. He has created a climate to relax but has never found the time or inclination. Indeed, he runs faster and faster. This is not a recent development.
Budd Schulberg captured this frightening mania in "What Makes Sammy Run" (1941) over a half century ago. The novel is the story of Sammy Glick who fought his way from New York's lower east side, over the bodies of his friends and mistresses to the top of the heap in Hollywood, and he could never stop running. It is a twentieth century novel but it describes the twenty-first century man to a tee, who is afraid to stop to find out who he is or why he is for fear he will lose his place in the race for good.
Man-the-Machine is in perpetual motion like the guy who has been driving all day, and who keeps waking up at night, imagining himself still behind the wheel. He is the lonely hunter uncertain of his prey. Consequently, Man-the-Machine has slipped into the insidious habit of anxiety, tension, over-alertness, and always being on, craving connection to fill a void that only exists because he is afraid to stop.
Some reading this may declare that they take care of themselves physically, earn a living, build a business or profession, manage a family and otherwise conduct themselves with much success in public and private affairs, so who's to say I'm not in control?
* * * * * *
Reading this, you can understand why Lincoln and Jackson, and now Obama are on my radar.
CONFIDENT THINKING, should it get published, and there are no guarantees when someone writes because he must, and worries not at all about the publishing end until it is finished. My writing may seem too serious too intent and too contentious. It might be all of these. But I sense we are waiting for another 9/11 when the real danger is not material combustion but psychological and emotional implosion. If you read history, no nation or civilization has ever been destroyed from "without," but always "within."
Be always well,
Jim
Thursday, January 15, 2009
THE ASCENT OF MONEY
THE ASCENT OF MONEY
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 15, 2009
“Make money your god, it will plague you like the devil.”
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), author of “Gulliver’s Travels”
“Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of its filling a vacuum, it makes one. If it satisfies one want, it doubles and trebles that want another way.”
Benjamin Franklin (1708 – 1790), American statesman, inventor, and author
* * * * * *
Today, eating my lunch, I watched an hour show on PBS television on the "Ascent of Money."
I mention it to you because if you are confused about bonds, hedge funds, derivatives, options, the business of futures, and irrational exuberance of the stock market, this program should prove insightful.
Check www.pbs.org for further information.
You will learn about Enron and its incredible duplicity. Its workers reached a state of euphoria where they expected bonuses of four to five times their base salary.
(1) Enron worked its way into being the middleman between energy producers and consumers. Once established, they blackmailed blackouts to create the sense of scarcity, and force utilities to pay them larger fees, which were in turn passed on to users, mainly in California and western states.
(2) Enron had Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and President George H. W. Bush in its pocket: Greenspan through deregulation, and Bush by seeing legislation through Congress user friendly to Enron.
There are conversations with the cunning investor, Mr. Billionaire Soros, and two guys who won the Nobel Prize applying Quantum mathematics to options. They established the Long Term Investment Corporation, and became billionaires, operating as if on another planet with their rocket science of financial mathematics. They, too, came spiraling downward when mere human beings didn't fit their probabilities.
It was Einstein who said, "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
Then, there was a guy profiled named "Gross" who started out as a black jack dealer in Las Vegas. He is now controller of the World Bond Market, and one of the most powerful men on the planet. It is bonds that underpin all finance, and as you will see in this program, that is scary.
Another paradox of equal horror is that the United States has borrowed its entire national security away. We find ourselves now held hostage to our creditors, mainly China, for our profligate ways.
China holds the US liable, a country in which the average Chinese worker has a personal income is $2,000 per year to the US personal income of $44,000. How is that possible, you ask? Even the poorest of Chinese save up to half of their income, while we save none of ours. The narrator calls the relationship "Chimerica," a take off on the mythical beast chimera, part lion, part goat, and part dragon.
A final note of possible interest, those Ivy League nerds who won the Nobel Prize for Economics would have had a more reliable database if they had taken into account in their calculation data a few years earlier, say to the October 1987 Wall Street crash.
The point the narrator was making is that we don't learn from history because we live totally in the present. People today can hear about the Great Depression or crashes such as 1974 and 1987, but it doesn't compute with their mindset, and therefore outside their radar. In A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD dealt with this, and the main reason I wrote it.
Another point that I make in my writing is this: we forget about the unpredictability of human behavior and so disregard it, preferring to fly by the seat of our pants.
I am not attempting to sell the program but to suggest informationally it could give you some perspective just on how volatile the world is that we are handing off to our kids and grandkids.
Some have suggested here in this media (emails) that I am a "pessimist" for not jumping on the bandwagon of the optimists. I see myself at this late stage still as that Irish kid whose parents couldn't make it week to week on my da's paycheck. No, I've never bought into the HYPE, and should you view this program, chances are nor will you.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 15, 2009
“Make money your god, it will plague you like the devil.”
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), author of “Gulliver’s Travels”
“Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of its filling a vacuum, it makes one. If it satisfies one want, it doubles and trebles that want another way.”
Benjamin Franklin (1708 – 1790), American statesman, inventor, and author
* * * * * *
Today, eating my lunch, I watched an hour show on PBS television on the "Ascent of Money."
I mention it to you because if you are confused about bonds, hedge funds, derivatives, options, the business of futures, and irrational exuberance of the stock market, this program should prove insightful.
Check www.pbs.org for further information.
You will learn about Enron and its incredible duplicity. Its workers reached a state of euphoria where they expected bonuses of four to five times their base salary.
(1) Enron worked its way into being the middleman between energy producers and consumers. Once established, they blackmailed blackouts to create the sense of scarcity, and force utilities to pay them larger fees, which were in turn passed on to users, mainly in California and western states.
(2) Enron had Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and President George H. W. Bush in its pocket: Greenspan through deregulation, and Bush by seeing legislation through Congress user friendly to Enron.
There are conversations with the cunning investor, Mr. Billionaire Soros, and two guys who won the Nobel Prize applying Quantum mathematics to options. They established the Long Term Investment Corporation, and became billionaires, operating as if on another planet with their rocket science of financial mathematics. They, too, came spiraling downward when mere human beings didn't fit their probabilities.
It was Einstein who said, "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
Then, there was a guy profiled named "Gross" who started out as a black jack dealer in Las Vegas. He is now controller of the World Bond Market, and one of the most powerful men on the planet. It is bonds that underpin all finance, and as you will see in this program, that is scary.
Another paradox of equal horror is that the United States has borrowed its entire national security away. We find ourselves now held hostage to our creditors, mainly China, for our profligate ways.
China holds the US liable, a country in which the average Chinese worker has a personal income is $2,000 per year to the US personal income of $44,000. How is that possible, you ask? Even the poorest of Chinese save up to half of their income, while we save none of ours. The narrator calls the relationship "Chimerica," a take off on the mythical beast chimera, part lion, part goat, and part dragon.
A final note of possible interest, those Ivy League nerds who won the Nobel Prize for Economics would have had a more reliable database if they had taken into account in their calculation data a few years earlier, say to the October 1987 Wall Street crash.
The point the narrator was making is that we don't learn from history because we live totally in the present. People today can hear about the Great Depression or crashes such as 1974 and 1987, but it doesn't compute with their mindset, and therefore outside their radar. In A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD dealt with this, and the main reason I wrote it.
Another point that I make in my writing is this: we forget about the unpredictability of human behavior and so disregard it, preferring to fly by the seat of our pants.
I am not attempting to sell the program but to suggest informationally it could give you some perspective just on how volatile the world is that we are handing off to our kids and grandkids.
Some have suggested here in this media (emails) that I am a "pessimist" for not jumping on the bandwagon of the optimists. I see myself at this late stage still as that Irish kid whose parents couldn't make it week to week on my da's paycheck. No, I've never bought into the HYPE, and should you view this program, chances are nor will you.
Be always well,
Jim
Friday, January 02, 2009
THE CLICHE DRIVEN PRESS -- AN EXCHANGE!
THE CLICHÉ DRIVEN PRESS – AN EXCHANGE!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2, 2008
“Let him who would move the world, first move himself.”
Socrates
Reference:
This is a response from my Canadian friend who sent me the article from THE ECONOMIST. It is interesting that I left off the final sentence to my reply, which I found redundant. The sentence: “I sense that is precisely what THE ECONOMIST meant for me to see.” You will see the relevance of this sentence in the reader’s thoughtful reply.
* * * * * *
A READER WRITES:
Jim,
Thanks for dissecting that article for me and sharing your views. I now wonder if I should have stated my own views to introduce the article. http://www.economist.com/theworldin/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12574180
I entirely agree with you, the article in the Economist was written in "code", but frankly that is the point. It was written for those familiar with a certain closed language, a cultish shorthand or jargon. These code words and phrases have profound meaning to certain proponents of an economic system called "THE MARKET". As written, I concur, the article can rightfully be condemned as "closed language", unclear and imprecise. But this language is not entirely beyond the grasp of lay people (non-economists) who make the effort to do some translating and to understand the underlying meaning.
Your translation is a starting point but I strongly suggest it is worth the effort for all of us to decode and interpret the central message of the article.
Imprecise language notwithstanding, this article (declaration in fact) is outstanding news for all of us (citizens). The Globalists are raising the white flag in light of the recent financial system upheaval. Since, we can safely say most newspapers and magazines understand their audience (who they are), it follows that they become a mirror reflecting the views of that audience (bias' etc.) to survive as a business. Hence, the Economist article is a clarion call to their faithful (their market fundamentalist audience) that a new world order must be formulated. As you say, something has been learned that could not be learned any other way than by painful experience ("We learn slowly if at all, and then only when we must.").
Importantly, we must all appreciate that presently there is a vacuum where once the true-believers in Globalism were absolutely certain of their religion and aggressively insistent that we (the citizens) submit passively to its inevitability, which we have, for about 25 years. The experiment has now ended badly and suddenly we now inhabit a critical period of opportunity for those brave enough to think and speak for themselves... expressing our ideas clearly and honestly (as you do Jim). It's urgent that we all get busy talking and writing to our elites, both our elected representatives and the non-corporate think-tanks who are suddenly listening as never before. They and we now know for certain, the Globalists were wrong. In the present vacuum it is now possible to reassert the citizen as the source of legitimacy in our democracies. Economic fundamentalism, as represented by free trade and unrestricted flows of capital, is the now failed passive approach, thank God.
Again, thank you for the time and effort you took to read and respond to the article and if you are so inclined please feel free to comment on my interpretation.
Very best wishes to you and BB,
George
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Your response is so on target that I will say only this. We live in an elitist culture of the worse kind, not elitist in ideas but in celebrity.
The walls have been coming down for elitists who live in jargon, or special branches of knowledge, as knowledge is becoming accessible to everyone. In one of my books (not published) I call this new age the ‘Age of the Amateur.”
Knowledge is the amateur’s tool. Knowledge is the celebrity's uniform.
The encroaching importance of the amateur is unsettling for those who know who they are only by who they aren’t. Put otherwise, people who live in celebrity have gone from a peculiarity or fringe factor (Hollywood, etc.) to a major industry. The only point you make that made me queasy was when you said “writing to our elites.”
We have no elites of ideas. Therefore, we have no elites.
We only have celebrity. And only last night, I heard a commentator say, “Barah Obama is the greatest celebrity president in history.”
You can imagine how that made me feel. We don’t need a presence we need a performance. We need people who perform without taking bows but quietly accomplish the mission. JFK and Jacqueline Kennedy created the “Camelot Presidency,” and we are still in its celebrity shadow.
Kennedy is considered a “great president” because we went to the moon, something that was already in the works. Forgotten is his part in the “Cuban Missile Crisis,” “The Cuban Invasion,” “Vietnam War,” and the little he did for the “Civil Rights Movement,” president Johnson being the true “Civil Rights President,” and yes, even previously, the defrocked president Nixon did his bit.
I am weary of all media, but especially media that emanates from the church, school, government, workplace, television and the Internet that promotes celebrity as elitism.
I hope you are right. I hope people are starting to think for themselves. I am not as optimistic as you are.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2, 2008
“Let him who would move the world, first move himself.”
Socrates
Reference:
This is a response from my Canadian friend who sent me the article from THE ECONOMIST. It is interesting that I left off the final sentence to my reply, which I found redundant. The sentence: “I sense that is precisely what THE ECONOMIST meant for me to see.” You will see the relevance of this sentence in the reader’s thoughtful reply.
* * * * * *
A READER WRITES:
Jim,
Thanks for dissecting that article for me and sharing your views. I now wonder if I should have stated my own views to introduce the article. http://www.economist.com/theworldin/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12574180
I entirely agree with you, the article in the Economist was written in "code", but frankly that is the point. It was written for those familiar with a certain closed language, a cultish shorthand or jargon. These code words and phrases have profound meaning to certain proponents of an economic system called "THE MARKET". As written, I concur, the article can rightfully be condemned as "closed language", unclear and imprecise. But this language is not entirely beyond the grasp of lay people (non-economists) who make the effort to do some translating and to understand the underlying meaning.
Your translation is a starting point but I strongly suggest it is worth the effort for all of us to decode and interpret the central message of the article.
Imprecise language notwithstanding, this article (declaration in fact) is outstanding news for all of us (citizens). The Globalists are raising the white flag in light of the recent financial system upheaval. Since, we can safely say most newspapers and magazines understand their audience (who they are), it follows that they become a mirror reflecting the views of that audience (bias' etc.) to survive as a business. Hence, the Economist article is a clarion call to their faithful (their market fundamentalist audience) that a new world order must be formulated. As you say, something has been learned that could not be learned any other way than by painful experience ("We learn slowly if at all, and then only when we must.").
Importantly, we must all appreciate that presently there is a vacuum where once the true-believers in Globalism were absolutely certain of their religion and aggressively insistent that we (the citizens) submit passively to its inevitability, which we have, for about 25 years. The experiment has now ended badly and suddenly we now inhabit a critical period of opportunity for those brave enough to think and speak for themselves... expressing our ideas clearly and honestly (as you do Jim). It's urgent that we all get busy talking and writing to our elites, both our elected representatives and the non-corporate think-tanks who are suddenly listening as never before. They and we now know for certain, the Globalists were wrong. In the present vacuum it is now possible to reassert the citizen as the source of legitimacy in our democracies. Economic fundamentalism, as represented by free trade and unrestricted flows of capital, is the now failed passive approach, thank God.
Again, thank you for the time and effort you took to read and respond to the article and if you are so inclined please feel free to comment on my interpretation.
Very best wishes to you and BB,
George
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Your response is so on target that I will say only this. We live in an elitist culture of the worse kind, not elitist in ideas but in celebrity.
The walls have been coming down for elitists who live in jargon, or special branches of knowledge, as knowledge is becoming accessible to everyone. In one of my books (not published) I call this new age the ‘Age of the Amateur.”
Knowledge is the amateur’s tool. Knowledge is the celebrity's uniform.
The encroaching importance of the amateur is unsettling for those who know who they are only by who they aren’t. Put otherwise, people who live in celebrity have gone from a peculiarity or fringe factor (Hollywood, etc.) to a major industry. The only point you make that made me queasy was when you said “writing to our elites.”
We have no elites of ideas. Therefore, we have no elites.
We only have celebrity. And only last night, I heard a commentator say, “Barah Obama is the greatest celebrity president in history.”
You can imagine how that made me feel. We don’t need a presence we need a performance. We need people who perform without taking bows but quietly accomplish the mission. JFK and Jacqueline Kennedy created the “Camelot Presidency,” and we are still in its celebrity shadow.
Kennedy is considered a “great president” because we went to the moon, something that was already in the works. Forgotten is his part in the “Cuban Missile Crisis,” “The Cuban Invasion,” “Vietnam War,” and the little he did for the “Civil Rights Movement,” president Johnson being the true “Civil Rights President,” and yes, even previously, the defrocked president Nixon did his bit.
I am weary of all media, but especially media that emanates from the church, school, government, workplace, television and the Internet that promotes celebrity as elitism.
I hope you are right. I hope people are starting to think for themselves. I am not as optimistic as you are.
Be always well,
Jim
Thursday, January 01, 2009
THE CLICHE DRIVEN PRESS WHEN A BIT OF CANDOR IS CALLED FOR
THE CLICHÉ DRIVEN PRESS WHEN A BIT CANDOR IS CALLED FOR
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 1, 2009
“Examine what is said, not him who speaks.”
Arabian Proverb
REFERENCE:
In the course of a year, I receive literally hundreds of invitations from readers to read this or that book, this or that article, and then to render my comment on the material. I receive the same complement of materials on this or that opinion, asking me for mine as well. These responses are from involved and concerned persons who think for themselves, but desire confirmation that others think as they do.
Yesterday, I received a letter from a reader of my books and articles, who attached an official letter from Pam Iorio, Mayor of Tampa, Florida, a friend of hers.
She feels the mayor should have me on the mayor’s television program discussing books and ideas. The letter from the mayor to this reader concluded, “I really enjoyed our lunch! I hope to meet Dr. Fisher in the future.”
I doubt that I will hear from the mayor, and it is just as well because I don’t talk in sound bytes (as readers know) and I don’t say what you necessarily want to hear. We live in an age where explaining has become the substitute for acting, and who is speaking and from what platform the evidence of relevance. Small wonder we are so lost.
* * * * * *
A READER WRITES ABOUT AN ARTICLE IN “THE ECONOMIST”:
Did you see this Jim?
http://www.economist.com/theworldin/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12574180
I notice they use some of your language, e.g. hubris. The anticipated world order will be better for ordinary Americans, I personally think, and I’m sure you would agree. I would be interested in your take on the article in any case.
Happy New Year
George
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
George,
I hope your daughter had a nice visit here on the Sun Coast of Florida when she was here. She came about a week early before we had the balmy days of summer in winter here. I don’t think she minded the temperatures in the high 60s and low 70s coming from Canada at this time of year.
Regarding "The Economist" piece, I am not convinced we are moving into better days for ordinary citizens, but quite the contrary. The easy road for Western society is behind us; the hard road is what we are all now traveling on.
Over the next century, I sense there will be serious upheaval of the old and old traditions as we transition to the new world order. In fact, it is doubtful to my mind that anyone living today will have much sense of a utopian existence, but quite the latter. We learn slowly if at all, and then only when we must.
There is a wrenching difference between the haves and have nots of the world, and the West is no longer an isolated oasis. Yet, in a time of such transparency, where it is nigh impossible to hide abuse or poverty or severe disadvantage, there is hope of some improvement, how much is doubtful in the next hundred years.
Talking heads escape into their BlackBerries and cell phones yapping away nonsensically everywhere, in the United Nations, in Congress, in the august bodies of government and commerce all over the world, as everywhere is nowhere, which is the definition of “utopia.”
Those that would lead are pushed and pulled by destiny but not by any consensus will. We are a sorry mess, and I see no improvement for scores of years.
The article you would have me read is part of the problem. It is a piece totally devoid of content and with that nearly mystical roll of witchcraft drums in words to soothe the conscience of the reader.
I am always amazed when professional writers for such prestigious periodicals as THE ECONOMIST resort so much to clichés, which communicate so little. Here are a few that got my attention:
(1) "Clay feet of economic system."
The economic system is not a metaphor and does not have clay feet. Say what you mean. The economy is completely dysfunctional led by greed, neglect, and excess. It is capitalism of the absurd.
(2) "Gap between global system for economics and global political system which must be addressed."
Notice how we toss these terms around while none of them has been well defined, mainly, I suppose, because we're not quite sure what global economics or global politics actually means.
Fuzzy thinking is from people like myself all the way up the food chain, and it is scary! I include myself because I too often lead without a clear separation between my emotions or intuitions and my mind.
I feel things before I see them, and my feelings have been a better gauge to my success in life than my mind. I think this is true of most others as well because it is easier to explain success or failure after the fact, but not before.
I’ve always known when I was in troubled waters. It wasn’t my mind alerting me to the danger but my heart. I write with my heart not my head. I wish I saw more of this in politicians and corporate leaders whereas it is common among novelists, poets and painters. Why? Solzhenitsyn put it best: "Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art." It is the mind that has gotten us into trouble, not the heart. Artists compose witht the heart.
(3) "Economy must be put on sound footing."
There we go again with feet!
(4) "Entitlement programs reviewed and national dependence on debt overcome."
Now, here is something of substance. Our entire economy is debt dependent. So, what are we doing? We are leveraging economy with even increasing debt.
Economist and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman writes that debt is good and good government is government not afraid of debt, as FDR was not afraid of it in 1933.
I am a poor kid whose father worked on the Works Project Administration (WPA) and it put food on the table. But WWII -- if you can believe all the books I've read -- killed the Great Depression, not the plethora of government programs under FDR's "New Deal."
(5) "Soft power."
It means diplomatic power, statesmanship, negotiation, and the rest as opposed to "hard power" which is military might. I wonder, though, how many people pass over this expression without a clue.
(6) "What is the future of capitalism?" Ah ha! This is slipped in but not elaborated when I think it is extremely important to the next expression.
Capitalism is in trouble. The so-called “invisible hand controlling the market place” no longer applies. We have moved beyond Adam Smith. Like sacred texts, however, we give up the literally meaning of the words reluctantly if at all. We have seen how slowly words such as “empire” and “nationalism” and “monarchy” have hung on long after their relevance ceased. So, it will be with capitalism.
(7) "Must have a debate over priorities."
Obama cannot play God, but he can make wise choices such as Lincoln made. When one of Lincoln's general said he had pushed the Confederate army deep into the South, and was celebrating the fact with his troops, Lincoln said, "My God, man, the South is part of the Union. It is not a separate country."
Content and context can get terribly mixed up in the mind of a person with the wrong focus. They are both essential but not the same. This was the general’s problem.
Periodically, I read a spate of book on this or that subject. Currently, Lincoln is on my mind. It is hard to believe how timid were his generals. I can understand why he would get angry and depressed.
Priorities have always been an easy lot for me. They were for Lincoln as well. I don't think they are for most Americans. We look for answers outside ourselves, for experts, for confirmation of our feelings, rather than weighing our feelings against our experiences. We forget how valuable our failures are in our successes, how much our disappointments bring us into more intimate contact with ourselves and improve our character. How about Canadians?
(8) "Global objective/national interests."
Again, I'm not sure what this means. I listen to C-Span, and the wise men and talking heads of the world that use such corporate speak. I can imagine what fun Erasmus would have with such empty language. I’ve concluded that no one wants to offend anyone else, so nobody has the courage to express what they think, or to ask hard questions about such empty expressions as 'global objective' or ‘national interests.’
Of the more than 6 millions souls on this earth, 80 percent of them have little or no stake in either expression. Don’t they count? Be careful! If you say they do, where is the evidence in terms of ‘global objective’ and ‘national interest’? This is the West talking to itself in the mirror.
(9) "(US) prided itself in its exceptionalism."
Isn't that the truth, and now we're all paying dearly for it, wherever we might be.
(10) "(US) must discipline itself, develop a strategy of gradualism in order to accumulate the attainable."
These are three phrases I tied together, as they speak to what the rest of the article only hinted at, but clearly stated in the title, "An End of Hubris."
There will be no end in sight to hubris as long as Americans are a tactical not a strategically directed people. Tactics are based on a single objective; strategies are based on a holistic approach. Americans can talk strategy but they walk tactics, and so it has always been.
As for gradualism, think of it for a minute. What is gradual about the “Electronic Age”? What is gradual about the ‘bail out’? What is gradual about the previous ‘space race’? Americans are addicted to speed and excess be the driver success or failure.
(11) "Dialogue with the rest of the world."
That is my primary hope with the new president. (10) Has kept this nation at bay. He will have to be another Lincoln to succeed.
(12) "(US) will not remain self-proclaimed tutor" as it experiences the "limits of hegemony."
We must go back 100 years to the Age of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to when the United States first convinced itself it was the supreme educator ("tutor") of the world order.
Americans hate words such as “empire” and “hegemony,” seeing such words as implying Americans are greedy for expansion.
The United States has failed to see that mind expansion is every bit as dangerous and intrusive as territorial expansion.
Mind expansion implies that American culture and way of life is better than that of anyone else.
If there is one thing I have learned in my long life, traveling the world, is that people love their own customs, their own languages, their own religions, their own way of doing things, in their own place and space without anyone suggesting that their way is inferior to others.
It has been my personal experience that people of strong biases are not content with those biases but feel compelled to have others think as they do. I have also noticed that people that deny their own problems often feel compelled to solve those of others as if they are superiorly qualified, when they don’t have their own house in order.
Notice how judgmental some are. Do you wonder why they are? It has been my experience that the seeds of such damage are the failure to be self-accepting. Emerson saw this in his time with Americans 150 years ago. I have seen in my own time as well.
George, I am a simple soul who knows so little about economics that I ask myself these kinds of questions when I read such foolishness.
Herbert Marcuse, the French philosopher, said that a one-dimensional society attempts to explain everything away as its policy of dealing with its problems. Language becomes an end in itself rather than an expression of ideas. It is interesting to me that Marcuse has been discounted by many Americans, not because of the relevance of what he says about the Western mindset, but because of his political beliefs. Quite conveniently, he is discounted summarily on this basis by many Western thinkers when he is trying to assist them in getting to the next dimension of their existence.
Be always well,
Jim
-----------------
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 1, 2009
“Examine what is said, not him who speaks.”
Arabian Proverb
REFERENCE:
In the course of a year, I receive literally hundreds of invitations from readers to read this or that book, this or that article, and then to render my comment on the material. I receive the same complement of materials on this or that opinion, asking me for mine as well. These responses are from involved and concerned persons who think for themselves, but desire confirmation that others think as they do.
Yesterday, I received a letter from a reader of my books and articles, who attached an official letter from Pam Iorio, Mayor of Tampa, Florida, a friend of hers.
She feels the mayor should have me on the mayor’s television program discussing books and ideas. The letter from the mayor to this reader concluded, “I really enjoyed our lunch! I hope to meet Dr. Fisher in the future.”
I doubt that I will hear from the mayor, and it is just as well because I don’t talk in sound bytes (as readers know) and I don’t say what you necessarily want to hear. We live in an age where explaining has become the substitute for acting, and who is speaking and from what platform the evidence of relevance. Small wonder we are so lost.
* * * * * *
A READER WRITES ABOUT AN ARTICLE IN “THE ECONOMIST”:
Did you see this Jim?
http://www.economist.com/theworldin/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12574180
I notice they use some of your language, e.g. hubris. The anticipated world order will be better for ordinary Americans, I personally think, and I’m sure you would agree. I would be interested in your take on the article in any case.
Happy New Year
George
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
George,
I hope your daughter had a nice visit here on the Sun Coast of Florida when she was here. She came about a week early before we had the balmy days of summer in winter here. I don’t think she minded the temperatures in the high 60s and low 70s coming from Canada at this time of year.
Regarding "The Economist" piece, I am not convinced we are moving into better days for ordinary citizens, but quite the contrary. The easy road for Western society is behind us; the hard road is what we are all now traveling on.
Over the next century, I sense there will be serious upheaval of the old and old traditions as we transition to the new world order. In fact, it is doubtful to my mind that anyone living today will have much sense of a utopian existence, but quite the latter. We learn slowly if at all, and then only when we must.
There is a wrenching difference between the haves and have nots of the world, and the West is no longer an isolated oasis. Yet, in a time of such transparency, where it is nigh impossible to hide abuse or poverty or severe disadvantage, there is hope of some improvement, how much is doubtful in the next hundred years.
Talking heads escape into their BlackBerries and cell phones yapping away nonsensically everywhere, in the United Nations, in Congress, in the august bodies of government and commerce all over the world, as everywhere is nowhere, which is the definition of “utopia.”
Those that would lead are pushed and pulled by destiny but not by any consensus will. We are a sorry mess, and I see no improvement for scores of years.
The article you would have me read is part of the problem. It is a piece totally devoid of content and with that nearly mystical roll of witchcraft drums in words to soothe the conscience of the reader.
I am always amazed when professional writers for such prestigious periodicals as THE ECONOMIST resort so much to clichés, which communicate so little. Here are a few that got my attention:
(1) "Clay feet of economic system."
The economic system is not a metaphor and does not have clay feet. Say what you mean. The economy is completely dysfunctional led by greed, neglect, and excess. It is capitalism of the absurd.
(2) "Gap between global system for economics and global political system which must be addressed."
Notice how we toss these terms around while none of them has been well defined, mainly, I suppose, because we're not quite sure what global economics or global politics actually means.
Fuzzy thinking is from people like myself all the way up the food chain, and it is scary! I include myself because I too often lead without a clear separation between my emotions or intuitions and my mind.
I feel things before I see them, and my feelings have been a better gauge to my success in life than my mind. I think this is true of most others as well because it is easier to explain success or failure after the fact, but not before.
I’ve always known when I was in troubled waters. It wasn’t my mind alerting me to the danger but my heart. I write with my heart not my head. I wish I saw more of this in politicians and corporate leaders whereas it is common among novelists, poets and painters. Why? Solzhenitsyn put it best: "Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art." It is the mind that has gotten us into trouble, not the heart. Artists compose witht the heart.
(3) "Economy must be put on sound footing."
There we go again with feet!
(4) "Entitlement programs reviewed and national dependence on debt overcome."
Now, here is something of substance. Our entire economy is debt dependent. So, what are we doing? We are leveraging economy with even increasing debt.
Economist and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman writes that debt is good and good government is government not afraid of debt, as FDR was not afraid of it in 1933.
I am a poor kid whose father worked on the Works Project Administration (WPA) and it put food on the table. But WWII -- if you can believe all the books I've read -- killed the Great Depression, not the plethora of government programs under FDR's "New Deal."
(5) "Soft power."
It means diplomatic power, statesmanship, negotiation, and the rest as opposed to "hard power" which is military might. I wonder, though, how many people pass over this expression without a clue.
(6) "What is the future of capitalism?" Ah ha! This is slipped in but not elaborated when I think it is extremely important to the next expression.
Capitalism is in trouble. The so-called “invisible hand controlling the market place” no longer applies. We have moved beyond Adam Smith. Like sacred texts, however, we give up the literally meaning of the words reluctantly if at all. We have seen how slowly words such as “empire” and “nationalism” and “monarchy” have hung on long after their relevance ceased. So, it will be with capitalism.
(7) "Must have a debate over priorities."
Obama cannot play God, but he can make wise choices such as Lincoln made. When one of Lincoln's general said he had pushed the Confederate army deep into the South, and was celebrating the fact with his troops, Lincoln said, "My God, man, the South is part of the Union. It is not a separate country."
Content and context can get terribly mixed up in the mind of a person with the wrong focus. They are both essential but not the same. This was the general’s problem.
Periodically, I read a spate of book on this or that subject. Currently, Lincoln is on my mind. It is hard to believe how timid were his generals. I can understand why he would get angry and depressed.
Priorities have always been an easy lot for me. They were for Lincoln as well. I don't think they are for most Americans. We look for answers outside ourselves, for experts, for confirmation of our feelings, rather than weighing our feelings against our experiences. We forget how valuable our failures are in our successes, how much our disappointments bring us into more intimate contact with ourselves and improve our character. How about Canadians?
(8) "Global objective/national interests."
Again, I'm not sure what this means. I listen to C-Span, and the wise men and talking heads of the world that use such corporate speak. I can imagine what fun Erasmus would have with such empty language. I’ve concluded that no one wants to offend anyone else, so nobody has the courage to express what they think, or to ask hard questions about such empty expressions as 'global objective' or ‘national interests.’
Of the more than 6 millions souls on this earth, 80 percent of them have little or no stake in either expression. Don’t they count? Be careful! If you say they do, where is the evidence in terms of ‘global objective’ and ‘national interest’? This is the West talking to itself in the mirror.
(9) "(US) prided itself in its exceptionalism."
Isn't that the truth, and now we're all paying dearly for it, wherever we might be.
(10) "(US) must discipline itself, develop a strategy of gradualism in order to accumulate the attainable."
These are three phrases I tied together, as they speak to what the rest of the article only hinted at, but clearly stated in the title, "An End of Hubris."
There will be no end in sight to hubris as long as Americans are a tactical not a strategically directed people. Tactics are based on a single objective; strategies are based on a holistic approach. Americans can talk strategy but they walk tactics, and so it has always been.
As for gradualism, think of it for a minute. What is gradual about the “Electronic Age”? What is gradual about the ‘bail out’? What is gradual about the previous ‘space race’? Americans are addicted to speed and excess be the driver success or failure.
(11) "Dialogue with the rest of the world."
That is my primary hope with the new president. (10) Has kept this nation at bay. He will have to be another Lincoln to succeed.
(12) "(US) will not remain self-proclaimed tutor" as it experiences the "limits of hegemony."
We must go back 100 years to the Age of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to when the United States first convinced itself it was the supreme educator ("tutor") of the world order.
Americans hate words such as “empire” and “hegemony,” seeing such words as implying Americans are greedy for expansion.
The United States has failed to see that mind expansion is every bit as dangerous and intrusive as territorial expansion.
Mind expansion implies that American culture and way of life is better than that of anyone else.
If there is one thing I have learned in my long life, traveling the world, is that people love their own customs, their own languages, their own religions, their own way of doing things, in their own place and space without anyone suggesting that their way is inferior to others.
It has been my personal experience that people of strong biases are not content with those biases but feel compelled to have others think as they do. I have also noticed that people that deny their own problems often feel compelled to solve those of others as if they are superiorly qualified, when they don’t have their own house in order.
Notice how judgmental some are. Do you wonder why they are? It has been my experience that the seeds of such damage are the failure to be self-accepting. Emerson saw this in his time with Americans 150 years ago. I have seen in my own time as well.
George, I am a simple soul who knows so little about economics that I ask myself these kinds of questions when I read such foolishness.
Herbert Marcuse, the French philosopher, said that a one-dimensional society attempts to explain everything away as its policy of dealing with its problems. Language becomes an end in itself rather than an expression of ideas. It is interesting to me that Marcuse has been discounted by many Americans, not because of the relevance of what he says about the Western mindset, but because of his political beliefs. Quite conveniently, he is discounted summarily on this basis by many Western thinkers when he is trying to assist them in getting to the next dimension of their existence.
Be always well,
Jim
-----------------
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