RESPONSE TO: GOD’S GREATEST CRUELTY?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 27, 2009
“Not for himself, but for the world he lives.”
The young Roman poet, Lucan (39 – 65 AD)
“True philosophy invents nothing; it merely establishes and describes, “what is.”
Victor Cousin (1792 – 1867), French philosopher
REFERENCE:
Many have responded to MY FAVORITE UNCLE, which dealt with the shock of learning of his Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. P responded by sharing his experience with Alzheimer’s. I replied by asking the rhetorical question: God’s greatest cruelty? This is a reaction to that comment.
A WRITER WRIES:
Hello Jim,
I wasn’t inclined to comment on such a personal story. There is no meaning in commentary disassociated from the experience. The note from P and your brief response led to the following thoughts.
“God’s greatest cruelty?” The crux of the matter is in the punctuation. Put a period or exclamation point after and the discussion takes on a very different tack and meaning.
Many of us have experienced first-hand or from a distance this degenerative curse. Few of us are so close to the person as to see it to an end. Most remember the early stages, or as we refer to them later – the signs. Physical degeneration brought about by cancer and heart disease doesn’t seem to trigger as deep emotions the way mental conditions do. The piece about the uncle demonstrates the personal struggle to accept the change.
One might be inclined to say “God’s greatest cruelty” is inflicted upon those who witness the decline, frustrated by the inability to impede its progress, confused by the mystery of a failing human system, and challenged by the demands of providing care for the afflicted. Or, it might be God’s greatest gift.
The oldest of five, I had two brothers with the most severe type of Muscular Dystrophy. Both parents worked. And, I was the main caretaker for those times they were away from home. I’m no saint. I was a child. I got angry at times, more often than I should have. But, I grew out of it quickly. I wanted time away from them to do things that boys like to do and found brief opportunities to do so. Adults would tsk tsk and comment about having a “cross to bear.” What does that mean? As a child, this is all I knew.
To bear a cross one has to know what an unburdened life is. This life situation is much like the fabled frog in boiling water. The need increases as time moves on, and it’s all relative. The incremental change is not noticed and the weight of that change is borne by the increasing strength gained from all that has gone before.
This may be why adult onset diseases inspire so much behavioral examination. There is a baseline reference.
We are programmed to believe that while we may physically fall below the baseline, there is solace in the knowledge we have gained and how it enables us to contribute to the elevation of young that follow.
Your friend P does what he can. And, the families, I’m sure, appreciate the break he offers from the constant attention and worry Alzheimer’s commands from those closest. Nature attempts in many ways to confront us with great cruelties in life. But, they are only cruel by our choosing.
That’s the beauty of nature. We choose the path believing our conscious choice is the best one. But nature has many surprises in store for us. What makes us special, as your story points out, is our reaction.
You like quotes. Remember John Lennon’s famous one? “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans.”
Peace and wonder,
Michael
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Michael,
There is nothing that can be said about the care giving circumstances thrust upon you other than it made you the person I know you to be. Adversity more than advantage, it has been my experience, makes us what we are and can become. As you point out, this is personal and no one might ever know it except in the strength of character shown in other ways.
The wonder of this medium (Internet) is that we are all connected, and can express ourselves openly and honestly, which is not only useful in that connection, but is also good for the soul.
I was quite moved by Dr. P’s experience, and rushed off a note. At the time, I was waiting to take BB to the hospital for an exploratory examination and quite nervous. I am now writing this after that examination, and she is okay, thank God!
It is interesting about using a period, an exclamation point or a question mark. It does change the sense of the expression. I never thought of the period but I did think of the exclamation point, feeling that was not consistent with my mind at that moment. The question mark was right for me, but may not be right for someone reading this.
And yes, Michael, you are right. I do like a quotation here or there, as they succinctly tell us so much as does this one you quote by John Lennon. Incidentally, he’s been a favorite of mine for years with the following Lennon quote in my first book (CONFIDENT SELLING Prentice-Hall 1970):
“Everyone can be a success; if you keep saying that enough times to yourself you can be. We’re no better than anybody else. We’re all the same. We’re as good as Beethoven. Everyone’s the same inside. You need the desire and the right circumstances, but it’s nothing to do with talent or with training or education. You get primitive painters and writers don’t you? Nobody told them how to do it. They told themselves they could do it and just did it . . .” (pp 174 – 175).
Be always well,
Jim
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. is an industrial and organizational psychologist writing in the genre of organizational psychology, author of Confident Selling, Work Without Managers, The Worker, Alone, Six Silent Killers, Corporate Sin, Time Out for Sanity, Meet Your New Best Friend, Purposeful Selling, In the Shadow of the Courthouse and Confident Thinking and Confidence in Subtext. A Way of Thinking About Things, Who Put You in a Cage, and Another Kind of Cruelty are in Amazon’s KINDLE Library.
Friday, February 27, 2009
GOD'S GREATEST CRUELTY?
GOD’S GREATEST CRUELTY?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 27, 2009
REFERENCE: The writer is responding to my piece, MY FAVORITE UNCLE. He is a friend of my generation, an athlete and scholar of distinction, who went on to do wonderful things in servant leadership. What he expresses here is consistent with him as a person. His father was vice principal of my high school when I was a boy. The reference to him in this piece is his father overhearing a conversation I had with another person in which I was hardly charitable. He put me in my place not knowing that he also opened my eyes.
JRF
A FRIEND WRITES:
Jim
Thank you for sharing the article about your uncle. It touched me in many ways as I have two very good friends who are approaching the "far side" of Alzheimer's. I see the changes week by week, but all I can do is spend some time with them and try to help their families.
P
DR. FISHER RESPONDS
Dear P,
I sometimes wonder if Alzheimer’s disease is not God’s greatest cruelty: to give us this fine mind and to take it away from us before God takes our body.
Every day of my life I thank God for the mind He gave me for being conscious of the act of writing these words, appreciating the act of sharing them with you, and being moved by your kindness to your friends, knowing the fact and the act of knowing are a gift that I had nothing to do with having but have received as the richest possession of life itself.
Yesterday was the 51st birthday of my daughter, Laurie, who is the mother of two fine children, Rachel, 10, and Ryan, 12, both with wonderful minds and healthy spirits. They excel in school as if without effort, but I reminded them again, as I have many times before, never punish anyone with this gift but always use it to better serve them. By doing so, you better serve yourself and demonstrate to God your appreciation of the gift. It is a gift that can be taken away at any time, and sometimes we forget that and act as if we were the gift’s creator.
I knew your father, and something I’ve never mentioned before, I once had a conversation with him that touches somewhat on this subject. What I took away from that conversation – me being a young person full of myself – was that what I had and what I was came not from me but through me.
Thank you for sharing,
And always be well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 27, 2009
REFERENCE: The writer is responding to my piece, MY FAVORITE UNCLE. He is a friend of my generation, an athlete and scholar of distinction, who went on to do wonderful things in servant leadership. What he expresses here is consistent with him as a person. His father was vice principal of my high school when I was a boy. The reference to him in this piece is his father overhearing a conversation I had with another person in which I was hardly charitable. He put me in my place not knowing that he also opened my eyes.
JRF
A FRIEND WRITES:
Jim
Thank you for sharing the article about your uncle. It touched me in many ways as I have two very good friends who are approaching the "far side" of Alzheimer's. I see the changes week by week, but all I can do is spend some time with them and try to help their families.
P
DR. FISHER RESPONDS
Dear P,
I sometimes wonder if Alzheimer’s disease is not God’s greatest cruelty: to give us this fine mind and to take it away from us before God takes our body.
Every day of my life I thank God for the mind He gave me for being conscious of the act of writing these words, appreciating the act of sharing them with you, and being moved by your kindness to your friends, knowing the fact and the act of knowing are a gift that I had nothing to do with having but have received as the richest possession of life itself.
Yesterday was the 51st birthday of my daughter, Laurie, who is the mother of two fine children, Rachel, 10, and Ryan, 12, both with wonderful minds and healthy spirits. They excel in school as if without effort, but I reminded them again, as I have many times before, never punish anyone with this gift but always use it to better serve them. By doing so, you better serve yourself and demonstrate to God your appreciation of the gift. It is a gift that can be taken away at any time, and sometimes we forget that and act as if we were the gift’s creator.
I knew your father, and something I’ve never mentioned before, I once had a conversation with him that touches somewhat on this subject. What I took away from that conversation – me being a young person full of myself – was that what I had and what I was came not from me but through me.
Thank you for sharing,
And always be well,
Jim
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
MY FAVORITE UNCLE -- A PROFESSOR RESPONDS
MY FAVORITE UNCLE – A PROFESSOR RESPONDS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 24, 2009
“Sincerity is to speak as we think, to do as we pretend and profess, to perform what we promise, and rally to be what we would seem and appear to be.”
John Tillotson (1630 – 1694), Archbishop of Canterbury
NOTE: I've been in contact with AARP, and they are in the process of evaluating the possible interest that might be generated by publishing this piece titled “My Favorite Uncle,” which deals with my becoming aware of my brilliant uncle’s Alzheimer’s disease. I've often been moved by my correspondence from readers, reading my stuff, but this has to be close to the all time high in its naked sincerity. JRF
-----------------
TO MY READERS:
This professor’s sincere expression of his thoughts is the reason I write.
JRF
AN INTERNATIONALLY KNOWN PROFESSOR WRITES:
This is a note created 24 Feb. 2009 to thank James Fisher for the story
he shared of his Uncle who had dementia and where Jim discovered the
nature of Alzheimer's.
Jim
I very much appreciated your story of your Uncle and your visit. I lost my father about 6 years ago and for his last few years he "suffered" from Alzheimer's and I would spend hours with him on the ward of patients with the same condition. I learned a great deal from this and had some wonderful moments together as we relived the past.
When I could I would drive him back to the poorer part of town where I grew up. Your stories of Clinton Iowa often very much help me to recall those past days when I was being shaped by an environment I never choose and could not wait to leave. What helped put me on my path for advanced education and travels to over 70 countries was partially to escape a home on the wrong side of the river.
My home of my first 22 years was Topeka and my part of town was working class but ironically across the train tracks in my neighborhood was the "colored" section, and even poorer.
In my very first year of school everyone was white and we never knew we were poor or in a lower economic class because across the tracks was the "poor" school and no whites went there. Then came the legal case to desegregate started by the Brown family and taken all the way to the supreme court of the land.
Soon I was in a very different school and that decision was a blessing for me and I truly learned how little importance should be given to appearance, skin color or what others said about what is the good or bad side of town.
After I left the military most of my choices of where to live and what to do have been mine, at least up until I started a family now most of those decisions are "we decisions" and more from inertia than careful choice.
In both an unholy war and an unholy separation of people based on shared myths I learned to question, challenge and to learn for myself first hand what was the better way and how hard it can be to not just discover this but to help others to search for it
themselves
.
My drive to understand empowerment, and as you know I have published two books on this theme, was created in me at a very early age. With each passing year I can see that very few have been given the opportunity to learn much if anything about this concept because of the way our culture still holds on to such myths as the concept of zero sum which make it so difficult for us to perceive what created power might
look like. Until our culture examines itself more deeply and decides to abandon a few antiquated myths about how wealth is created and how the economic system must benefit only a few at the cost of sacrificing the many we won't move ourselves out of this very serious recession.
If we can understand that we create the economic structures and that they should not be creating us then we might be able to create a more just society that recognizes the unlimited possibilities of what can be done in economic terms as we work together to create the goods and services that we really desire.
We could create a system where we learn to work or what we want instead of working towards something that others tell us we should own. We might also choose the native tradition of looking seven generations forward rather than wanting it all now and shifting those external costs of environmental recovery to our children.
I truly think that once we experience a challenge to our thinking we are capable
of growing, my shock at an early age put me on a path I have never regretted.
Your lessons from an uncle you so clearly loved helped to make you who you are and this age of economic confusion will force us all to make the effort to learn the lessons we are being shown and recreate a system that better serves us.
You might even call this in some way "shock therapy" and it could be exactly what we needed to push us out of our comfortable complacency and force us to act in ways that we can agree on are better.
You have given me a gift to see my past through your reflections, this last missive was very touching and my experience with dementia is a shared one.
One of the beliefs that helped me through this period was the concept of several cultures that this phase of life can be seen as "half-life and half-death." This thought served me well then, helped me to accept the condition, and also helped me to prepare for what most likely will be at some time in the future my own experience of those last few years in this play called life.
I have continued to be most curious about this last act of our three-act play. It could last, as long as another 3 or 4 decades or as we all know it could be done in the next 3-4 seconds.
I feel as if I have always known this to be the case and seldom fear death, even in my time in Vietnam or some rather tricky moments in Somalia or high in the Himalayas I can't seem to relate to death with fear. Death is more a wonderment and this is why this notion of a half-life seemed to be such a gift.
This Alzheimer's disease can be experienced with great fear, most around my father were fearful or angry, but he and I shared some very special moments and I was so fortunate in that he never really forgot who I was.
And I with those hours spent just sitting by him in a hospital ward will never forget just being there with him in those hours and how difficult it was to just be with him while all around other patients were acting out their final few years of life.
Each visit was a lesson I needed to learn, never easy but always important.
The half death side of this condition is what also gives me hope, some call this a long good bye and for us it very much was. Likely in no other situation could I have spent so much time with my dad in his last few years. A long good bye is for some of us a chance to just be with each other, nothing has to happen and nothing has to be said but at some special level just being together is what is most remembered and most
valued.
To accept the just being side of my life has not been easy. Like so many of us in this culture I too often feel if I am not DOING I am less alive. Slowly over many, many years I am beginning to value just BEING and though it so often feels like an unnatural act my father in his last few days was finally able to teach me something about this lesson.
Of all of my lessons learned from him this one might be one of the most important and until I started to write this note of thanks of you I am not even sure I knew this.
So again thanks and keep being that writer that you were born to be, and for you I do hope you also have the chance to just BE and in that continue to take in all those wonderful human stories but not always feel you have to DO something about them.
Just sharing them means a lot to me and I am sure you could hear this echoed wide and far as you take the time to just sit and take in that story of how much what you are doing is appreciated.
So for me I wish you and BB get a quiet moment to just stop and enjoy knowing that together you both are making some very nice music.....
K
PS Jim, you may notice I edited this away from my normal running commentary in all lower case for email exchanges. I did this because I think I may be following your example and want to leave a bit of myself behind in a form that others may read. I doubt if any of this could be that important but I do feel as I am sure you do we have lived in some most interesting times and they just get to be more interesting every day.
k
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 24, 2009
“Sincerity is to speak as we think, to do as we pretend and profess, to perform what we promise, and rally to be what we would seem and appear to be.”
John Tillotson (1630 – 1694), Archbishop of Canterbury
NOTE: I've been in contact with AARP, and they are in the process of evaluating the possible interest that might be generated by publishing this piece titled “My Favorite Uncle,” which deals with my becoming aware of my brilliant uncle’s Alzheimer’s disease. I've often been moved by my correspondence from readers, reading my stuff, but this has to be close to the all time high in its naked sincerity. JRF
-----------------
TO MY READERS:
This professor’s sincere expression of his thoughts is the reason I write.
JRF
AN INTERNATIONALLY KNOWN PROFESSOR WRITES:
This is a note created 24 Feb. 2009 to thank James Fisher for the story
he shared of his Uncle who had dementia and where Jim discovered the
nature of Alzheimer's.
Jim
I very much appreciated your story of your Uncle and your visit. I lost my father about 6 years ago and for his last few years he "suffered" from Alzheimer's and I would spend hours with him on the ward of patients with the same condition. I learned a great deal from this and had some wonderful moments together as we relived the past.
When I could I would drive him back to the poorer part of town where I grew up. Your stories of Clinton Iowa often very much help me to recall those past days when I was being shaped by an environment I never choose and could not wait to leave. What helped put me on my path for advanced education and travels to over 70 countries was partially to escape a home on the wrong side of the river.
My home of my first 22 years was Topeka and my part of town was working class but ironically across the train tracks in my neighborhood was the "colored" section, and even poorer.
In my very first year of school everyone was white and we never knew we were poor or in a lower economic class because across the tracks was the "poor" school and no whites went there. Then came the legal case to desegregate started by the Brown family and taken all the way to the supreme court of the land.
Soon I was in a very different school and that decision was a blessing for me and I truly learned how little importance should be given to appearance, skin color or what others said about what is the good or bad side of town.
After I left the military most of my choices of where to live and what to do have been mine, at least up until I started a family now most of those decisions are "we decisions" and more from inertia than careful choice.
In both an unholy war and an unholy separation of people based on shared myths I learned to question, challenge and to learn for myself first hand what was the better way and how hard it can be to not just discover this but to help others to search for it
themselves
.
My drive to understand empowerment, and as you know I have published two books on this theme, was created in me at a very early age. With each passing year I can see that very few have been given the opportunity to learn much if anything about this concept because of the way our culture still holds on to such myths as the concept of zero sum which make it so difficult for us to perceive what created power might
look like. Until our culture examines itself more deeply and decides to abandon a few antiquated myths about how wealth is created and how the economic system must benefit only a few at the cost of sacrificing the many we won't move ourselves out of this very serious recession.
If we can understand that we create the economic structures and that they should not be creating us then we might be able to create a more just society that recognizes the unlimited possibilities of what can be done in economic terms as we work together to create the goods and services that we really desire.
We could create a system where we learn to work or what we want instead of working towards something that others tell us we should own. We might also choose the native tradition of looking seven generations forward rather than wanting it all now and shifting those external costs of environmental recovery to our children.
I truly think that once we experience a challenge to our thinking we are capable
of growing, my shock at an early age put me on a path I have never regretted.
Your lessons from an uncle you so clearly loved helped to make you who you are and this age of economic confusion will force us all to make the effort to learn the lessons we are being shown and recreate a system that better serves us.
You might even call this in some way "shock therapy" and it could be exactly what we needed to push us out of our comfortable complacency and force us to act in ways that we can agree on are better.
You have given me a gift to see my past through your reflections, this last missive was very touching and my experience with dementia is a shared one.
One of the beliefs that helped me through this period was the concept of several cultures that this phase of life can be seen as "half-life and half-death." This thought served me well then, helped me to accept the condition, and also helped me to prepare for what most likely will be at some time in the future my own experience of those last few years in this play called life.
I have continued to be most curious about this last act of our three-act play. It could last, as long as another 3 or 4 decades or as we all know it could be done in the next 3-4 seconds.
I feel as if I have always known this to be the case and seldom fear death, even in my time in Vietnam or some rather tricky moments in Somalia or high in the Himalayas I can't seem to relate to death with fear. Death is more a wonderment and this is why this notion of a half-life seemed to be such a gift.
This Alzheimer's disease can be experienced with great fear, most around my father were fearful or angry, but he and I shared some very special moments and I was so fortunate in that he never really forgot who I was.
And I with those hours spent just sitting by him in a hospital ward will never forget just being there with him in those hours and how difficult it was to just be with him while all around other patients were acting out their final few years of life.
Each visit was a lesson I needed to learn, never easy but always important.
The half death side of this condition is what also gives me hope, some call this a long good bye and for us it very much was. Likely in no other situation could I have spent so much time with my dad in his last few years. A long good bye is for some of us a chance to just be with each other, nothing has to happen and nothing has to be said but at some special level just being together is what is most remembered and most
valued.
To accept the just being side of my life has not been easy. Like so many of us in this culture I too often feel if I am not DOING I am less alive. Slowly over many, many years I am beginning to value just BEING and though it so often feels like an unnatural act my father in his last few days was finally able to teach me something about this lesson.
Of all of my lessons learned from him this one might be one of the most important and until I started to write this note of thanks of you I am not even sure I knew this.
So again thanks and keep being that writer that you were born to be, and for you I do hope you also have the chance to just BE and in that continue to take in all those wonderful human stories but not always feel you have to DO something about them.
Just sharing them means a lot to me and I am sure you could hear this echoed wide and far as you take the time to just sit and take in that story of how much what you are doing is appreciated.
So for me I wish you and BB get a quiet moment to just stop and enjoy knowing that together you both are making some very nice music.....
K
PS Jim, you may notice I edited this away from my normal running commentary in all lower case for email exchanges. I did this because I think I may be following your example and want to leave a bit of myself behind in a form that others may read. I doubt if any of this could be that important but I do feel as I am sure you do we have lived in some most interesting times and they just get to be more interesting every day.
k
EDUCATION, PALLIATIVE TO INTOLERANCE
EDUCATION, PALLIATIVE TO INTOLERANCE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 23, 2009
“What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the human soul. The philosopher, the saint, the hero, the wise, and the good or the great, very often lie hid and concealed in a plebeian, which a proper education might have disinterred and brought to light.”
Joseph Addison (1672 – 1719), English essayist
* * * * * *
OVERVIEW
Over a ten-year period (1970 – 1980), I did consulting, while a full-time graduate student in industrial-organization psychology pursuing a Ph.D. in that discipline. I was able to practice my profession while I immersed in academia.
In the course of that work, I gave seminars from Seattle to Denver to Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York City, Hartford (Connecticut), Washington, DC, Richmond (Virginia), Raleigh (North Carolina), Charlotte (North Carolina), Atlanta, Jacksonville, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Miami, New Orleans, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
These were mainly executive seminars in the public sector sponsored by the Professional Institute of the American Management Association where I worked as a contract consultant. Attending these sessions, typically, would be city managers, mayors, city council members, police chiefs, and officers of state governments.
In addition, I did organization development (OD) interventions with several police agencies. One such intervention was a nine-month intervention in the Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD) after a riot occurred in Herndon, a small town in Fairfax County. An (FCPD) officer shot and killed a 26-year-old African American inside a Seven-Eleven Convenient store in a Hendon shopping plaza.
Subsequent to that, I conducted a three-month intervention of the Raleigh Police Department (RPD) in which the majority of the 350-man squad of sworn police officers walked off the job in protest to the leadership of the sitting police chief.
My police work in Fairfax County became the basis of my master’s thesis. My police work in Raleigh supported by a statistical study of several policed communities in Florida led to my Ph.D. dissertation. Also, factored into that research was other empirical police work conducted across the country, weighed against metropolitan police problems reported in the literature. This included the 1975 case of murder of a Mexican American while in the custody of Houston police officers.
The central theme here is that education is a powerful palliative to intolerance. With education, police officers are more inclined to serve and protect rather than resort to force in the performance of their duty. But herein lies a caveat. Novelist Joseph Wambaugh, formerly a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detective sergeant, says: “A community gets the police the community deserves.” It has been my experience that he is correct.
The better educated the community the less crime, drug addiction, teenage school dropouts, teenage pregnancies, teenage unemployment, promiscuity, and gratuitous violence against persons and property. Generally speaking, police reflect the way a community views itself, and the way it views itself is the way police believe they are expected to act.
Where communities are struggling with image, where African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities are not integrated into the wider community, trouble is likely to brew. A common statistics that bears repeating is that where 75 percent of white students and a comparable rate of minority students graduate from high school, teenage petty crime, drug abuse, pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, vandalism, and stealing are reduced to single digits. By the same token, where graduating rates are less, these numbers are more likely to be in the double digits.
Why? Let us look at this situation from the perspective of police.
Police see the policed naked with all our warts and blemishes, all our hidden secrets and shames revealed on a day-to-day basis. Policing takes a powerful toll on the social, psychological, emotional and psychic reserves of police officers often threatening their perspective of what it is to be a human being. No profession needs a more diverse tool kit to cope with the underbelly of society, and yet such a tool kit is often foreign to them.
Police officers should be acquainted with literature, history, with psychology, sociology and anthropology, with cultural studies, with languages, and with science and technology. All are necessary, but none more significant than understanding the human dynamics of human combustion.
Police officers require “3-D” proficiency: (1) direction; (2) discretionary use of their authority; and (3) decision-making acumen. The most effective police officers have never drawn their weapon. Common among them are a college education many with law degrees. They don't fall back on their ethnic biases because they realize they are not relevant.
“3-D” is the equivalent of seeing the situation clearly as if through clear glass while putting a mirror up to the individuals involved in an altercation, so that they might see themselves more clearly. Obviously, there are limitations to this when people are intoxicated, but you still deal with them with discretion knowing they are not in charge.
Over my career as a consultant to law enforcement professionals, I have found officers who could express themselves well were less intimidated by aberrant behavior and didn't have to hide behind their badge.
Police officers often have to make quick decisions in explosive situations. No profession is closer to being judge, jury and executioner than a police officer armed with a badge and revolver. Education not only increases tolerance, but also improves the chances of officers making wise decisions. Rather than have the situation deteriorate into confrontation, education gives them a chance to step back and consider the implications. Arrests may still have to be made but no one need be hurt.
Let us now look at these three police department to illustrate in particular what has been discussed here in general.
A SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY OF THE POLICE ORGANIZATION: THE ANATOMY OF A RIOT
After a riot occurred in Herndon, a small community in Fairfax County, Virginia, I was brought in by the America Management Association to assess the situation and make recommendations. I would spend the next nine months commuting back and forth from Tampa, Florida.
Herndon, a nearly total white community, received, over time, the relocation of some thousand African Americans into the community from Washington, DC, twelve miles away. Unfortunately, no infrastructure specifically to meet the needs of these new residents was established in the way of a jobs bureau, recreational center, or a plan to integrate them into the wider community. Only a small complex became a common meeting place as well as the lone shopping center.
Young people would hang out there and entertain themselves of a weekend by driving their cars around the shopping center with their ghetto blasters sending the beat of the music into the night. This was found disturbing to white residence, and a curfew was imposed that seriously restricted this activity. This was considered an affront to African Americans in general. Tensions were high and on the rise.
Then an incident occurred that set off a riot. There was a young black man popular with his peers, let us call him “Sam,” who wasn’t intimidated by white police officers, especially one who had it in for him, let us call him “Joe.”
Sam was a renegade, unemployed, and enjoyed shocking his peers with his daring. He was twenty-six-years-old with a suspended driver’s license, only to be caught by Joe seeing him pull into the Seven-Eleven convenient store in the shopping center.
Joe followed Sam into the store and confronted him as he was getting a cold drink out of the cooler. Joe asked to see his license to which Sam said, “Why, I ain’t drivin nothing!” Joe reminded him what he had seen. Egging people on was Sam's style, which found him looking around the store, asking, “Any of you see me drive in here?” No one answered.
“Are you calling me a liar?” Joe steamed. Sam uttered some profanity under his breath, laughed and attempted to walk away.
“What did you call me?” Joe stormed as he pushed Sam hard against the cooler breaking the glass, cutting Sam, and angering him to the point that he grabbed Joe’s nightstick and attempted to defend himself. Joe unloaded his service revolver on Sam, killing him dead.
The shooting occurred in the late afternoon of an autumn day. An hour later youths were throwing rocks at passing cars. This gravitated to making Molotov cocktails by early evening, throwing them first at cars, and then on the roofs of the shopping center buildings setting the whole complex on fire.
It was evident from the first that FCPD was not prepared for this. The department had grown with the community from a police force of 80 sworn officers twenty years ago to more than 600 now, but the department still operated as if 80 officers. Item:
(1) Three quarters of the police force had come up through the ranks including the entire command staff, none of whom had any college training.
(2) More than 75 percent of the sworn officers lived outside the county, one of the most affluent in the nation, because they could not afford to live there. Thus they had little sense of community or ownership.
(3) The sworn officers were not trained for riot situations nor did they have the necessary flack vests, gas masks, and fire protection uniforms for such duty.
(4) There was no formal community action plan or network with the black leadership of the community. As one leader put it, we are the forgotten minority.
(5) Fire fighters were not able to put out the fires because they were not confident they could depend on police protection.
(6) A delay of several hours ensued while suitable protective attire was acquired for police officers from Fort Meade. By that time little was left of the shopping plaza.
(7) Looting was ignored and no arrests were made because of the handicap of the lack of protective gear.
FROM HEEL TO HERO
The whole drama was put on its head when a shamed police office who once “borrowed” a fine Swiss knife from the evidence lock up, which sabotaged a pending case, and was suspended for the theft, and treated as a non person, happened to be the only person in the department with a good relationship with the black leadership.
Without authority, leaving behind his protective gear, he walked in the middle of “no man’s land,” which separated the two camps, Molotov cocktails falling around him, and yelled, "It's me!" Somebody in the black community said, “Stop, let him pass.” And they did.
Later, he would say he didn’t think before he stepped forward. “It just happened.” He didn’t think of his physical safety, or what the “brass” might think. “It was a case of pure insanity on both sides,” he confided. “Better believe I wasn’t trying to play hero.”
He knew what it felt like to be ostracized. He was also studying sociology at the George Mason University. In an unofficial way, he had developed rapport with the African American minister and other community leaders. He felt certain they trusted him and wouldn’t harm him. For a few hours, he became the chief negotiator between the rioters and the police, indeed, the embodiment of police authority, and was effective in neutralizing the situation. It was his action that saved bloodshed and further embarrassment to the police and the county.
Over the next nine months I learned a great deal about FCPD. The department was out of touch with the times. The command center had computers but complaints were hand counted. Computer specialists existed in the department but were serving their allotted time in patrol, as officer succession was not unlike it had been twenty years before when the department had only 80 officers. Recommendations were made to address such irrelevancies, which were in the early stages of being implemented when I completed my assignment.
THE MUTINY OF THE 350 – AN HERCULE POIROT “OD” MOMENT
The Public Safety Institute (PSI), a law enforcement consulting firm, contacted me to work with it when the majority of the 350 sworn police officers of Raleigh, North Carolina walked off the job and refused to serve and protect the community. They issued an edict to the city manager and city council that unless the city removed the present police chief from office they would not return to work.
PSI brought in statisticians, police organization experts, and management consultants. My role in organization development (OD) was to be the people person on board. We each worked separately and would periodically compare notes. I rode several hundred hours over a three-month period with police officers on all three shifts. It wasn’t funny but I often felt as if we, meaning PSI, were acting like the Keystone Cops for all the progress we were making.
SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM
From interviews with the chief of police and the command staff I had a sense he was a shadow but not the source of the problem, although he was getting all the heat for the dissension and the mutiny.
We seem to create a structure of evil around anything that goes down poorly. It is an exercise in convenience. All guns can focus on a specific target, in this case the chief of police, and literally blast away. Frustration and anxiety follow. It could not be otherwise for I felt we were grasping at shadows while the real problem eluded us.
My intuitive sense was that we were being directed away from the source of the problem, but I wasn't certain how or why. I was riding with officers, interviewing senior city officials, and educators from various universities in the area, I even developed a brief questionnaire that was included in the water bill, but I felt as if I were treading water.
The questionnaire was not a scientific study, but was meant to provide an indication of the collective mindset of the community. More than ten percent responded, which in itself was impressive. The profile suggested a negative attitude towards the police, an exaggerated sense of personal and property crime, little interest in a larger police budget, improved officer training, or hiring college graduates for police work. Citizens just wanted the problem to go away.
The print media and television seemed as ambivalent as were citizens. Media seem content to have improved circulation and ratings with mutinied officers appearing in news stories, editorials, and major attraction of the 6 o’clock and 11 o’clock television news. The chief of police was given some coverage, but little changed.
There was an office I would pass every day with a white haired man sitting there reading a newspaper and doing little else. I stepped in one day, and introduced myself. “I know who you are.”
“You have one up on me,” I said, “I don’t have the pleasure of knowing you.”
“I’m the former city manager of this place," he said, spreading his arms out to encompass city hall, "was my job for more than twenty-five years.”
For the next two hours, he talked and I listened. A pattern developed. There were no more shadows, no more false roads. This was it! It all fit nicely together. He personified the problem, and in many ways, he was the problem.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM
The former city manager talked of an erosion of values and beliefs in the community he loved so dearly. He remembered when Raleigh was a pastoral community, gentrified, southern, with a tradition. Change he saw killing the community, killing the government, and now killing the police. His ignorance was monumental and it had come to prove costly to RPD.
He told a story of the late police chief, a personal friend, and the first college graduate chief of police in Raleigh’s history. The chief had a heart condition but was three years from retirement. The city manager instituted a policy of rotating the three active majors in the police department every four months as “acting chief” giving the actual chief a titular role.
Close to the end of this three-year period, his friend had a massive heart attack and died. The city manager appointed the senior major permanent chief, persuading the city council to approve the deputy city manager to take his place, and then he retired.
Three discernible islands were created in the wake of his leaving, internal war zone, each operating without a clear mandate, each without a clear function or direction, and each with deep suspicious of the other. He had created essentially three distinct police departments that were destined to spontaneously combust.
Once the senior major was made permanent chief, he neutralized his competition by appointing one major to administration and the other major to community service, while elevating his sergeant to the position of major over patrol. This was a line position where the power lay. In addition, he appointed an adversary who was a captain to permanent nights over the patrol division. This is where he made his error.
The captain was confident to the point of cocky and was a leader who thrived in situations in flux. Intelligent and cunning, he was also witty and popular with all patrol officers. The shelving to permanent nights was meant to punish him for his countermanding attitude to the new chief whom he saw as a buffoon, but instead provided him with theatre to create his havoc.
Eighty percent of the police force was attached to patrol. These officers rotated on three shifts on a monthly basis, giving the captain exposure to the entire patrol division on a regular basis. He used his uncanny sense of the dramatic and inclination to go for the jugular to gain their trust while exploiting their gullibility. Officers respected him for his wide experience and knowledge at several levels and often came to him for personal as well as professional advice. From the beginning, he manipulated their confusion and vulnerability, as these officers had a crisis in identity and confidence never being quite sure where they stood because each of the three chiefs had operated so differently.
The captain fed their disenchantment with the fine wine of grievance, giving it the body of language, while developing strategies to taunt the chief. He operated so subtly and persuasively that it wasn’t until my meeting with the former city manager that I recognized that I had been caught up in his evil not seeing it for what it was.
At roll call on the night shift, he would have mini seminars to demonstrate what leadership was, using the current chief as an example of what it was not. Often he would do this in a jocular and seemingly flippant way. Incrementally, he was feeding the officers’ frustration with his own massive contempt and deceit. Riding with officers and listening to them they sounded like a mouthpiece for his views. One officer, who was quite intelligent but poorly educated, and popular with the troops, found his inspiration in “Mein Kampf,” a book I suspect was given to him by the captain.
On occasion, this officer talked to me of natural law and natural justice, and the values and standards that are necessary to create a specific society of men. He would speak of police as if an organism with a unique history. When I would ask him what he meant, he would look at me passionately and declare, "A lone individual must conceive the values and purposes of the group and form its natural will."
It was no accident that he was the frequent face on the front page of the daily newspaper surrounded by his deputy rebel confederates. He would also be seen at the televised city council meetings, but the ventriloquist was the captain safely in his lair on permanent nights.
THE OD MOMENT
There aren’t many opportunities in the work of an industrial-organization psychologist when he can succinctly define a problem and frame the picture so clearly that his words take the air out the inflated disruption. That is what happened with my report of this situation.
Leaders of the community, as well as the police involved, could see now how they had been duped by the actions of the former city manager and the hidden agenda of the captain on nights.
Police officers returned to work, the police chief gave a special reprieve for most officers, created an appeals process, organized continuing education training, formed a task force to look into potential problems between the police and the policed, and gave special attention to minority community relations, which had been neglected.
The police chief remained in office until his retirement. He elected not to get rid of the captain on permanent nights, but he didn't have to worry. The captain retired.
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
Novelist Anthony Burgess penned a novel of this title with reference to the expression “as queer as a clockwork orange,” a punning reference to a mechanically responsive (clockwork) man, a creature who can only perform good or evil, a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil, or the “almighty state.”
Burgess sees the application of Pavlovian or mechanical laws as the critical index to human behavior. To emphasize this phenomenon, the protagonist of his story is conditioned to respond to feelings of evil, which prevent the exercise of his free will.
In the course of my work with police across the nation, I saw something of this mechanism working between the police and the policed. It became the title of my dissertation, “The Police Paradox: Systematic Exploration in the Paradoxical Dilemma of the Police and the Policed” (1978).
I was particularly drawn to the journalistic report of Tom Curtis in the Texas Monthly (September 1977). The article opens with this Pavlovian summation:
“Stephen Orlando never thought about being anything but a Houston police officer. A graduate of Waltrip High School on the city’s north side, he joined the force in 1975, when he was nineteen. His father is a police detective, his mother is a police dispatcher, and both his older brothers are Houston cops. Like so many of his fellow officers, he drives a pickup truck and says his main hobbies are hunting and fishing. Also, like most of the other officers, he has experienced the frustration of police work.”
The article goes on:
“Orlando isn’t a cop anymore. Last May he was fired from the force and then indicted – along with another Houston policeman, Terry Denson – for the murder of Joe Campos Torres, Jr., a prisoner in their custody.”
The article goes on to say that in three and a half years since Mayor Fred Hofheinz has been in office, there have been more than 25 cases in which police have shot and killed or wounded citizens without being prosecuted. Several of these cases are reviewed here along with the ambivalent outcomes, including that of Mr. Torres.
It was common for police officers, according to Curtis, to beat prisoners while handcuffed behind their backs, only in the case of Mr. Torres he died. Joe Campos Torres, was a 23-year-old Army veteran and a laborer for a glass contractor. His corpse was found floating in Buffalo Bayou on Mother’s Day.
Torres was drunk and disorderly when police arrested him at a club in the heart of Houston’s East End barrio on Thursday, May 5, at 11:35 p.m. Torres had a drinking problem that had resulted in his discharge from the Army the previous September, and on this particular evening he was apparently at the end of a twelve-hour drinking bender.
Torres fought with officers Stephen Orlando and Carless Elliott who wrestled him to the ground, handcuffed him and dragged the cursing Chicano to the backseat of the patrol car. Orlando told other officers responding to the radio dispatch that prisoner Torres had given them trouble. Two other police cruisers accompanied officers Orlando and Elliot to a dusty warehouse district east of downtown Houston. The three cruisers drove down the embankment to the south bank of Buffalo Bayou, far below street level.
The officers removed Torres from the car, leaving him handcuffed, and all except Elliott, the rookie, struck him repeatedly. Officer Terry Denson remarked that he had always wanted to watch a prisoner swim in the bayou.
At this point, Orlando and Elliott returned Torres to the patrol car and took him to the city jail. The duty sergeant took one look at him and ordered the pair to take him to the emergency room at Ben Taub Hospital, where he could be treated prior to booking.
But in the police car, Torres again cursed the officers. Orlando suggested instead of the hospital they needed to scare him before they let him go. Since Denson had wanted to throw somebody in the bayou, Orlando suggested this would be a good time.
Five officers, only Elliott not participating, carried the drunken and beaten Torres to the banks of the water. “Let’s see if the wetback can swim,” Denson said. With that, they shoved him over the edge, which was a twenty-foot drop to the water. Elliott returned from talking to dispatch handing Torres’ wallet to Orlando, who pitched it into the water. They shined their lights on Torres and saw his head was above water, and left. Three days later his body was found. The medical examiner ruled the cause of death was drowning.
CRUCIBLE OF INTOLERANCE
Orlando and Denson, the two officers charged with murder in the Torres case, are typical Houston police officers. From deep East Texas, Terry Denson is one of tens of thousands of semi-rural whites that have come to Houston in search of jobs. He worked nights to go to the University of Houston, but was drafted in the middle of his freshman year, and instead joined the Marines. After Vietnam, he joined the police force.
Twenty-seven-year-old Denson was a model cop with five years on the force when Joe Torres took his fatal plunge. Like Orlando, he had never fired his gun on duty. His record was exemplary, but what didn’t show up in Denson’s file was the same growing frustration Orlando felt, that the police were fighting a losing battle. Denson believed public resentment was building up against the badge itself.
The constant Houston police officers' lament was that justice seemed more on the side of the criminal; the public didn't want to help; nothing we did mattered.
The facts of the matter are that society keeps changing. This increases frustrations, and frustrations are not what many Houston police officers are equipped or trained to handle.
Still, police recruiting seems to be a bottom feeding activity as lower class recruits with the lowest socioeconomic backgrounds and the least education are most likely to be hired. Curtis writes, “In contrast to Dallas where 38 percent of the officers are college graduates, and Austin, where 22 percent are, only 11 percent of the Houston police force hold college degrees.” Curtis reports that the Houston Police Department routinely eliminates applicants who might be experienced in dealing with the variety of people who make up an urban society. They want people who look, think and behave as they do, not realizing the omen.
Psychologist Martin Reiser, an expert on stress, sees officers that resort to violence go through what he calls the “John Wayne Syndrome.” After three or four years, they go from idealistic, flexible, open-minded recruits to cynical, over serious, emotionally withdrawn, and strongly authoritarian officers.
It has been my experience it doesn’t take nearly as long as that. I saw changed behavior in nine-month-recruits in the Fairfax County Police Department. The first evidence was the swearing when they didn't swear at all initially. The second evidence was the change from cheerfulness to moodiness. The third thing I noticed was going from nonsmokers to chain smokers. In fact, within that period, most of the ugly side of FCPD was apparent in their conduct.
* * * * * *
These studies are more than a quarter century old. Yet, today, here in the early twenty-first century, few police departments have a majority of college graduates, and less than fifty percent of all police chiefs in the United States are college trained. The system exacts an amazing Pavlovian influence on behavior, as people reflect the face of the dominant culture. This is true of a police force, and is equally true of an entire community.
* * * * * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 23, 2009
“What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the human soul. The philosopher, the saint, the hero, the wise, and the good or the great, very often lie hid and concealed in a plebeian, which a proper education might have disinterred and brought to light.”
Joseph Addison (1672 – 1719), English essayist
* * * * * *
OVERVIEW
Over a ten-year period (1970 – 1980), I did consulting, while a full-time graduate student in industrial-organization psychology pursuing a Ph.D. in that discipline. I was able to practice my profession while I immersed in academia.
In the course of that work, I gave seminars from Seattle to Denver to Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York City, Hartford (Connecticut), Washington, DC, Richmond (Virginia), Raleigh (North Carolina), Charlotte (North Carolina), Atlanta, Jacksonville, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Miami, New Orleans, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
These were mainly executive seminars in the public sector sponsored by the Professional Institute of the American Management Association where I worked as a contract consultant. Attending these sessions, typically, would be city managers, mayors, city council members, police chiefs, and officers of state governments.
In addition, I did organization development (OD) interventions with several police agencies. One such intervention was a nine-month intervention in the Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD) after a riot occurred in Herndon, a small town in Fairfax County. An (FCPD) officer shot and killed a 26-year-old African American inside a Seven-Eleven Convenient store in a Hendon shopping plaza.
Subsequent to that, I conducted a three-month intervention of the Raleigh Police Department (RPD) in which the majority of the 350-man squad of sworn police officers walked off the job in protest to the leadership of the sitting police chief.
My police work in Fairfax County became the basis of my master’s thesis. My police work in Raleigh supported by a statistical study of several policed communities in Florida led to my Ph.D. dissertation. Also, factored into that research was other empirical police work conducted across the country, weighed against metropolitan police problems reported in the literature. This included the 1975 case of murder of a Mexican American while in the custody of Houston police officers.
The central theme here is that education is a powerful palliative to intolerance. With education, police officers are more inclined to serve and protect rather than resort to force in the performance of their duty. But herein lies a caveat. Novelist Joseph Wambaugh, formerly a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detective sergeant, says: “A community gets the police the community deserves.” It has been my experience that he is correct.
The better educated the community the less crime, drug addiction, teenage school dropouts, teenage pregnancies, teenage unemployment, promiscuity, and gratuitous violence against persons and property. Generally speaking, police reflect the way a community views itself, and the way it views itself is the way police believe they are expected to act.
Where communities are struggling with image, where African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities are not integrated into the wider community, trouble is likely to brew. A common statistics that bears repeating is that where 75 percent of white students and a comparable rate of minority students graduate from high school, teenage petty crime, drug abuse, pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, vandalism, and stealing are reduced to single digits. By the same token, where graduating rates are less, these numbers are more likely to be in the double digits.
Why? Let us look at this situation from the perspective of police.
Police see the policed naked with all our warts and blemishes, all our hidden secrets and shames revealed on a day-to-day basis. Policing takes a powerful toll on the social, psychological, emotional and psychic reserves of police officers often threatening their perspective of what it is to be a human being. No profession needs a more diverse tool kit to cope with the underbelly of society, and yet such a tool kit is often foreign to them.
Police officers should be acquainted with literature, history, with psychology, sociology and anthropology, with cultural studies, with languages, and with science and technology. All are necessary, but none more significant than understanding the human dynamics of human combustion.
Police officers require “3-D” proficiency: (1) direction; (2) discretionary use of their authority; and (3) decision-making acumen. The most effective police officers have never drawn their weapon. Common among them are a college education many with law degrees. They don't fall back on their ethnic biases because they realize they are not relevant.
“3-D” is the equivalent of seeing the situation clearly as if through clear glass while putting a mirror up to the individuals involved in an altercation, so that they might see themselves more clearly. Obviously, there are limitations to this when people are intoxicated, but you still deal with them with discretion knowing they are not in charge.
Over my career as a consultant to law enforcement professionals, I have found officers who could express themselves well were less intimidated by aberrant behavior and didn't have to hide behind their badge.
Police officers often have to make quick decisions in explosive situations. No profession is closer to being judge, jury and executioner than a police officer armed with a badge and revolver. Education not only increases tolerance, but also improves the chances of officers making wise decisions. Rather than have the situation deteriorate into confrontation, education gives them a chance to step back and consider the implications. Arrests may still have to be made but no one need be hurt.
Let us now look at these three police department to illustrate in particular what has been discussed here in general.
A SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY OF THE POLICE ORGANIZATION: THE ANATOMY OF A RIOT
After a riot occurred in Herndon, a small community in Fairfax County, Virginia, I was brought in by the America Management Association to assess the situation and make recommendations. I would spend the next nine months commuting back and forth from Tampa, Florida.
Herndon, a nearly total white community, received, over time, the relocation of some thousand African Americans into the community from Washington, DC, twelve miles away. Unfortunately, no infrastructure specifically to meet the needs of these new residents was established in the way of a jobs bureau, recreational center, or a plan to integrate them into the wider community. Only a small complex became a common meeting place as well as the lone shopping center.
Young people would hang out there and entertain themselves of a weekend by driving their cars around the shopping center with their ghetto blasters sending the beat of the music into the night. This was found disturbing to white residence, and a curfew was imposed that seriously restricted this activity. This was considered an affront to African Americans in general. Tensions were high and on the rise.
Then an incident occurred that set off a riot. There was a young black man popular with his peers, let us call him “Sam,” who wasn’t intimidated by white police officers, especially one who had it in for him, let us call him “Joe.”
Sam was a renegade, unemployed, and enjoyed shocking his peers with his daring. He was twenty-six-years-old with a suspended driver’s license, only to be caught by Joe seeing him pull into the Seven-Eleven convenient store in the shopping center.
Joe followed Sam into the store and confronted him as he was getting a cold drink out of the cooler. Joe asked to see his license to which Sam said, “Why, I ain’t drivin nothing!” Joe reminded him what he had seen. Egging people on was Sam's style, which found him looking around the store, asking, “Any of you see me drive in here?” No one answered.
“Are you calling me a liar?” Joe steamed. Sam uttered some profanity under his breath, laughed and attempted to walk away.
“What did you call me?” Joe stormed as he pushed Sam hard against the cooler breaking the glass, cutting Sam, and angering him to the point that he grabbed Joe’s nightstick and attempted to defend himself. Joe unloaded his service revolver on Sam, killing him dead.
The shooting occurred in the late afternoon of an autumn day. An hour later youths were throwing rocks at passing cars. This gravitated to making Molotov cocktails by early evening, throwing them first at cars, and then on the roofs of the shopping center buildings setting the whole complex on fire.
It was evident from the first that FCPD was not prepared for this. The department had grown with the community from a police force of 80 sworn officers twenty years ago to more than 600 now, but the department still operated as if 80 officers. Item:
(1) Three quarters of the police force had come up through the ranks including the entire command staff, none of whom had any college training.
(2) More than 75 percent of the sworn officers lived outside the county, one of the most affluent in the nation, because they could not afford to live there. Thus they had little sense of community or ownership.
(3) The sworn officers were not trained for riot situations nor did they have the necessary flack vests, gas masks, and fire protection uniforms for such duty.
(4) There was no formal community action plan or network with the black leadership of the community. As one leader put it, we are the forgotten minority.
(5) Fire fighters were not able to put out the fires because they were not confident they could depend on police protection.
(6) A delay of several hours ensued while suitable protective attire was acquired for police officers from Fort Meade. By that time little was left of the shopping plaza.
(7) Looting was ignored and no arrests were made because of the handicap of the lack of protective gear.
FROM HEEL TO HERO
The whole drama was put on its head when a shamed police office who once “borrowed” a fine Swiss knife from the evidence lock up, which sabotaged a pending case, and was suspended for the theft, and treated as a non person, happened to be the only person in the department with a good relationship with the black leadership.
Without authority, leaving behind his protective gear, he walked in the middle of “no man’s land,” which separated the two camps, Molotov cocktails falling around him, and yelled, "It's me!" Somebody in the black community said, “Stop, let him pass.” And they did.
Later, he would say he didn’t think before he stepped forward. “It just happened.” He didn’t think of his physical safety, or what the “brass” might think. “It was a case of pure insanity on both sides,” he confided. “Better believe I wasn’t trying to play hero.”
He knew what it felt like to be ostracized. He was also studying sociology at the George Mason University. In an unofficial way, he had developed rapport with the African American minister and other community leaders. He felt certain they trusted him and wouldn’t harm him. For a few hours, he became the chief negotiator between the rioters and the police, indeed, the embodiment of police authority, and was effective in neutralizing the situation. It was his action that saved bloodshed and further embarrassment to the police and the county.
Over the next nine months I learned a great deal about FCPD. The department was out of touch with the times. The command center had computers but complaints were hand counted. Computer specialists existed in the department but were serving their allotted time in patrol, as officer succession was not unlike it had been twenty years before when the department had only 80 officers. Recommendations were made to address such irrelevancies, which were in the early stages of being implemented when I completed my assignment.
THE MUTINY OF THE 350 – AN HERCULE POIROT “OD” MOMENT
The Public Safety Institute (PSI), a law enforcement consulting firm, contacted me to work with it when the majority of the 350 sworn police officers of Raleigh, North Carolina walked off the job and refused to serve and protect the community. They issued an edict to the city manager and city council that unless the city removed the present police chief from office they would not return to work.
PSI brought in statisticians, police organization experts, and management consultants. My role in organization development (OD) was to be the people person on board. We each worked separately and would periodically compare notes. I rode several hundred hours over a three-month period with police officers on all three shifts. It wasn’t funny but I often felt as if we, meaning PSI, were acting like the Keystone Cops for all the progress we were making.
SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM
From interviews with the chief of police and the command staff I had a sense he was a shadow but not the source of the problem, although he was getting all the heat for the dissension and the mutiny.
We seem to create a structure of evil around anything that goes down poorly. It is an exercise in convenience. All guns can focus on a specific target, in this case the chief of police, and literally blast away. Frustration and anxiety follow. It could not be otherwise for I felt we were grasping at shadows while the real problem eluded us.
My intuitive sense was that we were being directed away from the source of the problem, but I wasn't certain how or why. I was riding with officers, interviewing senior city officials, and educators from various universities in the area, I even developed a brief questionnaire that was included in the water bill, but I felt as if I were treading water.
The questionnaire was not a scientific study, but was meant to provide an indication of the collective mindset of the community. More than ten percent responded, which in itself was impressive. The profile suggested a negative attitude towards the police, an exaggerated sense of personal and property crime, little interest in a larger police budget, improved officer training, or hiring college graduates for police work. Citizens just wanted the problem to go away.
The print media and television seemed as ambivalent as were citizens. Media seem content to have improved circulation and ratings with mutinied officers appearing in news stories, editorials, and major attraction of the 6 o’clock and 11 o’clock television news. The chief of police was given some coverage, but little changed.
There was an office I would pass every day with a white haired man sitting there reading a newspaper and doing little else. I stepped in one day, and introduced myself. “I know who you are.”
“You have one up on me,” I said, “I don’t have the pleasure of knowing you.”
“I’m the former city manager of this place," he said, spreading his arms out to encompass city hall, "was my job for more than twenty-five years.”
For the next two hours, he talked and I listened. A pattern developed. There were no more shadows, no more false roads. This was it! It all fit nicely together. He personified the problem, and in many ways, he was the problem.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM
The former city manager talked of an erosion of values and beliefs in the community he loved so dearly. He remembered when Raleigh was a pastoral community, gentrified, southern, with a tradition. Change he saw killing the community, killing the government, and now killing the police. His ignorance was monumental and it had come to prove costly to RPD.
He told a story of the late police chief, a personal friend, and the first college graduate chief of police in Raleigh’s history. The chief had a heart condition but was three years from retirement. The city manager instituted a policy of rotating the three active majors in the police department every four months as “acting chief” giving the actual chief a titular role.
Close to the end of this three-year period, his friend had a massive heart attack and died. The city manager appointed the senior major permanent chief, persuading the city council to approve the deputy city manager to take his place, and then he retired.
Three discernible islands were created in the wake of his leaving, internal war zone, each operating without a clear mandate, each without a clear function or direction, and each with deep suspicious of the other. He had created essentially three distinct police departments that were destined to spontaneously combust.
Once the senior major was made permanent chief, he neutralized his competition by appointing one major to administration and the other major to community service, while elevating his sergeant to the position of major over patrol. This was a line position where the power lay. In addition, he appointed an adversary who was a captain to permanent nights over the patrol division. This is where he made his error.
The captain was confident to the point of cocky and was a leader who thrived in situations in flux. Intelligent and cunning, he was also witty and popular with all patrol officers. The shelving to permanent nights was meant to punish him for his countermanding attitude to the new chief whom he saw as a buffoon, but instead provided him with theatre to create his havoc.
Eighty percent of the police force was attached to patrol. These officers rotated on three shifts on a monthly basis, giving the captain exposure to the entire patrol division on a regular basis. He used his uncanny sense of the dramatic and inclination to go for the jugular to gain their trust while exploiting their gullibility. Officers respected him for his wide experience and knowledge at several levels and often came to him for personal as well as professional advice. From the beginning, he manipulated their confusion and vulnerability, as these officers had a crisis in identity and confidence never being quite sure where they stood because each of the three chiefs had operated so differently.
The captain fed their disenchantment with the fine wine of grievance, giving it the body of language, while developing strategies to taunt the chief. He operated so subtly and persuasively that it wasn’t until my meeting with the former city manager that I recognized that I had been caught up in his evil not seeing it for what it was.
At roll call on the night shift, he would have mini seminars to demonstrate what leadership was, using the current chief as an example of what it was not. Often he would do this in a jocular and seemingly flippant way. Incrementally, he was feeding the officers’ frustration with his own massive contempt and deceit. Riding with officers and listening to them they sounded like a mouthpiece for his views. One officer, who was quite intelligent but poorly educated, and popular with the troops, found his inspiration in “Mein Kampf,” a book I suspect was given to him by the captain.
On occasion, this officer talked to me of natural law and natural justice, and the values and standards that are necessary to create a specific society of men. He would speak of police as if an organism with a unique history. When I would ask him what he meant, he would look at me passionately and declare, "A lone individual must conceive the values and purposes of the group and form its natural will."
It was no accident that he was the frequent face on the front page of the daily newspaper surrounded by his deputy rebel confederates. He would also be seen at the televised city council meetings, but the ventriloquist was the captain safely in his lair on permanent nights.
THE OD MOMENT
There aren’t many opportunities in the work of an industrial-organization psychologist when he can succinctly define a problem and frame the picture so clearly that his words take the air out the inflated disruption. That is what happened with my report of this situation.
Leaders of the community, as well as the police involved, could see now how they had been duped by the actions of the former city manager and the hidden agenda of the captain on nights.
Police officers returned to work, the police chief gave a special reprieve for most officers, created an appeals process, organized continuing education training, formed a task force to look into potential problems between the police and the policed, and gave special attention to minority community relations, which had been neglected.
The police chief remained in office until his retirement. He elected not to get rid of the captain on permanent nights, but he didn't have to worry. The captain retired.
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
Novelist Anthony Burgess penned a novel of this title with reference to the expression “as queer as a clockwork orange,” a punning reference to a mechanically responsive (clockwork) man, a creature who can only perform good or evil, a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil, or the “almighty state.”
Burgess sees the application of Pavlovian or mechanical laws as the critical index to human behavior. To emphasize this phenomenon, the protagonist of his story is conditioned to respond to feelings of evil, which prevent the exercise of his free will.
In the course of my work with police across the nation, I saw something of this mechanism working between the police and the policed. It became the title of my dissertation, “The Police Paradox: Systematic Exploration in the Paradoxical Dilemma of the Police and the Policed” (1978).
I was particularly drawn to the journalistic report of Tom Curtis in the Texas Monthly (September 1977). The article opens with this Pavlovian summation:
“Stephen Orlando never thought about being anything but a Houston police officer. A graduate of Waltrip High School on the city’s north side, he joined the force in 1975, when he was nineteen. His father is a police detective, his mother is a police dispatcher, and both his older brothers are Houston cops. Like so many of his fellow officers, he drives a pickup truck and says his main hobbies are hunting and fishing. Also, like most of the other officers, he has experienced the frustration of police work.”
The article goes on:
“Orlando isn’t a cop anymore. Last May he was fired from the force and then indicted – along with another Houston policeman, Terry Denson – for the murder of Joe Campos Torres, Jr., a prisoner in their custody.”
The article goes on to say that in three and a half years since Mayor Fred Hofheinz has been in office, there have been more than 25 cases in which police have shot and killed or wounded citizens without being prosecuted. Several of these cases are reviewed here along with the ambivalent outcomes, including that of Mr. Torres.
It was common for police officers, according to Curtis, to beat prisoners while handcuffed behind their backs, only in the case of Mr. Torres he died. Joe Campos Torres, was a 23-year-old Army veteran and a laborer for a glass contractor. His corpse was found floating in Buffalo Bayou on Mother’s Day.
Torres was drunk and disorderly when police arrested him at a club in the heart of Houston’s East End barrio on Thursday, May 5, at 11:35 p.m. Torres had a drinking problem that had resulted in his discharge from the Army the previous September, and on this particular evening he was apparently at the end of a twelve-hour drinking bender.
Torres fought with officers Stephen Orlando and Carless Elliott who wrestled him to the ground, handcuffed him and dragged the cursing Chicano to the backseat of the patrol car. Orlando told other officers responding to the radio dispatch that prisoner Torres had given them trouble. Two other police cruisers accompanied officers Orlando and Elliot to a dusty warehouse district east of downtown Houston. The three cruisers drove down the embankment to the south bank of Buffalo Bayou, far below street level.
The officers removed Torres from the car, leaving him handcuffed, and all except Elliott, the rookie, struck him repeatedly. Officer Terry Denson remarked that he had always wanted to watch a prisoner swim in the bayou.
At this point, Orlando and Elliott returned Torres to the patrol car and took him to the city jail. The duty sergeant took one look at him and ordered the pair to take him to the emergency room at Ben Taub Hospital, where he could be treated prior to booking.
But in the police car, Torres again cursed the officers. Orlando suggested instead of the hospital they needed to scare him before they let him go. Since Denson had wanted to throw somebody in the bayou, Orlando suggested this would be a good time.
Five officers, only Elliott not participating, carried the drunken and beaten Torres to the banks of the water. “Let’s see if the wetback can swim,” Denson said. With that, they shoved him over the edge, which was a twenty-foot drop to the water. Elliott returned from talking to dispatch handing Torres’ wallet to Orlando, who pitched it into the water. They shined their lights on Torres and saw his head was above water, and left. Three days later his body was found. The medical examiner ruled the cause of death was drowning.
CRUCIBLE OF INTOLERANCE
Orlando and Denson, the two officers charged with murder in the Torres case, are typical Houston police officers. From deep East Texas, Terry Denson is one of tens of thousands of semi-rural whites that have come to Houston in search of jobs. He worked nights to go to the University of Houston, but was drafted in the middle of his freshman year, and instead joined the Marines. After Vietnam, he joined the police force.
Twenty-seven-year-old Denson was a model cop with five years on the force when Joe Torres took his fatal plunge. Like Orlando, he had never fired his gun on duty. His record was exemplary, but what didn’t show up in Denson’s file was the same growing frustration Orlando felt, that the police were fighting a losing battle. Denson believed public resentment was building up against the badge itself.
The constant Houston police officers' lament was that justice seemed more on the side of the criminal; the public didn't want to help; nothing we did mattered.
The facts of the matter are that society keeps changing. This increases frustrations, and frustrations are not what many Houston police officers are equipped or trained to handle.
Still, police recruiting seems to be a bottom feeding activity as lower class recruits with the lowest socioeconomic backgrounds and the least education are most likely to be hired. Curtis writes, “In contrast to Dallas where 38 percent of the officers are college graduates, and Austin, where 22 percent are, only 11 percent of the Houston police force hold college degrees.” Curtis reports that the Houston Police Department routinely eliminates applicants who might be experienced in dealing with the variety of people who make up an urban society. They want people who look, think and behave as they do, not realizing the omen.
Psychologist Martin Reiser, an expert on stress, sees officers that resort to violence go through what he calls the “John Wayne Syndrome.” After three or four years, they go from idealistic, flexible, open-minded recruits to cynical, over serious, emotionally withdrawn, and strongly authoritarian officers.
It has been my experience it doesn’t take nearly as long as that. I saw changed behavior in nine-month-recruits in the Fairfax County Police Department. The first evidence was the swearing when they didn't swear at all initially. The second evidence was the change from cheerfulness to moodiness. The third thing I noticed was going from nonsmokers to chain smokers. In fact, within that period, most of the ugly side of FCPD was apparent in their conduct.
* * * * * *
These studies are more than a quarter century old. Yet, today, here in the early twenty-first century, few police departments have a majority of college graduates, and less than fifty percent of all police chiefs in the United States are college trained. The system exacts an amazing Pavlovian influence on behavior, as people reflect the face of the dominant culture. This is true of a police force, and is equally true of an entire community.
* * * * * *
Saturday, February 21, 2009
"IN PRAISE OF FOLLY" -- THE PALLIATIVE TO GLOOM!
“IN PRAISE OF FOLLY” – THE PALLIATIVE TO GLOOM!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 20, 2009
REFERENCE: This is another excerpt from Confident Thinking.
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“Purely intellectual as Erasmus was, he could not be a partisan, not because of timidity, but because he saw good and the bad of all sides. He would not follow Luther, because he had mixed some evil with his good; he could not wish him utterly crushed, because of the Pharisees in the Catholic Church. He was always making exceptions, discovering distinctions, and toning down an otherwise too glaring statement. He could hardly write anything without some hedging, some slight doubt as to the unqualified validity of what he said. He, almost alone in his age, knew that truth had many faces, that no rule can be without exceptions, and that no position is unassailable.”
Preserved Smith, Erasmus: A Study of His Life, Ideals and Place in History (1923)
* * * * * *
If I have given the impression it is not healthy to see the Folly of our ways, I apologize because that is what is needed in troubled times. Folly is the foil to taking ourselves too seriously. The global economic meltdown of 2008, leading to the Recession of 2009 and beyond was fueled by panic, which is the bride of Folly. The investment bank of Bear Stearns had cash reserves of $18 billion when panic led to gloom and gloom led a raid on the bank.
A week later Bear Stearns was almost broke with its stock price plummeting from three digits to two digits and then to one digit, requiring a massive Federal Government “Bail Out.” This Folly is a reminder of the inaugural speech of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he took office in 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression, saying, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
FDR was well acquainted with Folly. Our actions indicate Folly does not have to be totally irrational when it is the bride of panic. After all, it has been scholars and learned men, some even called “wise men,” who have gotten us into these straits.
Plato reminds us, “We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” He was thinking of Folly. Absurd as the subprime real estate fiasco, or the run on the banks have proven to be, Confident Thinking was the greatest casualty. We sometimes forget it is personal trust that has always been the key to our survival.
Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman prefaces his televised remarks by assuring us “how smart” these financial people are running our economy. There is a touch of Folly here. Writer Studs Terkel, who lived through the Great Depression and wrote about it (“Hard Times”), tells us, “The lessons learned are that the big boys running the economy are not all that bright.” Folly is the palliative to gloom.
THE ANATOMY OF FOLLY – THE FINANCIAL MELTDOWN OF 2008
While we are busy applauding ourselves on how wise, sophisticated and advanced we are in the annals of human history, something happened in the first quarter of 2008 to remind us how prescient Erasmus (1466 – 1536) was 500 years ago, when he wrote “In Praise of Folly” (1509).
In the Spring of 2008, the subprime real estate bubble burst and the housing market crashed. There followed a run on the Wall Street investment bank, Bear Stearns. The banking stock was then trading for $171 per share. Company employees own 30 percent of the stock. Folly believed in the company.
Rumor fed by fear collapsed into panic and spread like a contagion. In 48 hours the stock was trading for $60. Alan Greenberg, a company executive, said there was no reason for the panic; that Bear Stearns had cash reserves of $18 billion. Before the week was out toxic assets consumed that cash reserve.
Bear Stearns didn’t invent greed but it drank from its polluted wells, buying hundreds of thousands of mortgages, bundling them up into securities, and then reselling them to investors. It was a formula for disaster but the best and the brightest thought it could be contained. Folly always wears a mask of confidence.
Morgan Stanley, the Federal Reserve, and the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) now took notice believing it was a manageable situation and not an avalanche. They were wrong.
Folly convinced itself that this nightmare would never occur as all Wall Street firms were bundled together in what are called “credit default swaps” (CDS). These are a form of insurance, which secures bonds. Bear Stearns, like everyone else, paid a nominal fee for this insurance with no intention of ever being forced to pay the face value of the bonds. It held $100s of billions in CDS, as did all of Wall Street, as did investment banks across the globe to the tune of $ trillions.
So incestuous were these financial arrangements on Wall Street that everyone was plugged in and connected to everyone else. A cascade of failures was not only imminent but seem inevitable. Folly ruled the waves. Nothing in living memory approached the potential calamity envisioned.
Secretary of Treasurer Hank Paulsen and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke were on the hot seat. Something had to be done. Bear Sterns was an unregulated investment bank, and money couldn’t be lent directly to it.
Bernanke got around this legality by giving $30 billion to J. P. Morgan to rescue Bear Sterns and assume control of its toxic securities. This was not an easy decision.
Two ideas were in play: “systemic risk,” that is, that failure was not an option as it would systemically cause irrevocably damage; and “moral hazard,” that is, the damage was self-inflicted and therefore those responsible should be punished by taking it on the chin.
Choosing the “systemic risk” option Paulsen and Bernanke thought they had stopped the leak in the financial dike. They were wrong. Their folly spelled “F-A-I-L-U-R-E” to Wall Street with the DOW Jones Industrials plunging 500 points, while Bear Stearns traded at $30.
This was not the end of Folly. Secretary Paulsen, a Republican who believed in “moral hazard,” wanted to punish Bear Stearns investors. He had J. P. Morgan pay stockholders of record $2 per share, when a little over a week before the stock was trading for $171 per share. Bear Stearns was now gone with many employees cleaned out of their jobs, life savings and stock portfolios. Employees cried openly without embarrassment as they felt they had done nothing wrong. With Folly, it is not necessary.
The tragic comedy was repeated with Fannie Mae and Freddie Max, two publicly traded companies that held more than $5 trillion in home mortgages. During this same period, these two firms lost 60 percent of their stock value. Systemic risk now ruled the decisions of our dynamic dual, as Paulsen and Bernanke had the Federal Government take over Fannie and Freddie. These are two of the largest companies in the world, proving that no company is too large to fail.
Next it was the investment bank Lehman Brothers, a company dominated by its CEO, Richard S. Fuld, Folly personified. He “was the company.” People cowered to him so he came to believe himself invincible, and thus ruled as if an anointed king with the swagger and arrogance of a financial Lone Ranger. He sought high-risk mortgages and wouldn’t listen to any of his people who sensed catastrophe. Nothing can touch Folly.
On a personal level, Paulsen and Fuld had gone head-to-head as competitors when Paulsen ran Morgan Stanley. Now, “it’s not my fault” Fuld was expecting the government to bail out Lehman Brothers as it had Bear Stearns. Folly is not too reflective. It didn’t happen. Paulsen applied his policy of “moral hazard.” Lehman Brothers went into bankruptcy and evaporated into the firmament.
Now, in the Fall of 2008 with American International Group, Inc. (AIG) holding $ billions of CDS of Lehman Brothers, capital is frozen. Banks are unable to borrow money. $ Trillions of debt threatens to put the global economy into another Great Depression. Systemic risk is now the policy of choice. The government loans $85 billion to AIG and takes 80 percent ownership of the company. This happened only two days after Lehman Brothers collapsed.
Still on the offensive, Paulsen and Bernanke pushed through Congress – on the second vote – a $700 billion “Bail Out” bill to purchase toxic mortgage securities. Congress had never acted so fast or with no chance to debate or modify the three and one-half page bill. Most Congressional bills take weeks if not months to establish consensus in committee before even coming to a vote, and then they run typically into the hundreds of pages. Congress was motivated to act quickly as the Dow Jones Industrials dropped 777 points after that first vote.
Next, Paulsen and Bernanke called the CEOs of the nine largest banks in the country to Washington, DC, sat them down, and told them the score. A capital injection of $ billions was to be made available to them to unfreeze the credit crunch. These CEOs were given a one-page non-negotiable document to take home, and return signed the next day. All nine CEOs signed. Within a week they had $125 billion. $350 billion of the “bail out” money had been spent already.
If you get the impression the dynamic dual were flying by the seat of their pants as Folly, that Paulsen and Bernanke had no overarching plan, that they were reacting rather than acting, stay tuned. You’ve heard nothing yet. Folly has been passed on to President Barak Obama. He has successfully badgered Congress into approving his nearly $ trillion “stimulus package” of 2009, which has a striking similar DNA to $700 billion predecessor.
THE MORE THINGS GO AROUND THEY COME AROUND
Erasmus lived in an equally chaotic period in Western civilization. Six years after he published “In Praise of Folly” (1511), Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the Castle Church door in Wittenberg, Germany (1517). Pope Leo X excommunicated the theologian for his heresy in 1521. Pope Clement VII excommunicated King Henry VIII in 1533 after the king divorced and remarried in defiance of Rome's refusal to annul his marriage. The king then formed the Church of England. Sir Thomas More, devoted friend of the king, was beheaded in 1535 for his refusal to vow allegiance to the king as his spiritual leader, remaining loyal to Rome to the end.
Erasmus and More were good friends, but very different men. Erasmus wrote “In Praise of Folly” in England while visiting Sir Thomas, but published it secretly and anonymously in France. Both men were rational intellectual leaders of the Renaissance, but of differing discretionary persuasions. Erasmus chose to work mainly behind the scenes of the Counter Reformation while Sir Thomas gave his life. Erasmus died a year after his friend was beheaded at age 70. More was 57 at his death.
It was religion, not finance that controlled the minds of men of the time. The Roman Catholic Church, which had been all-powerful since the Middle Ages, was declining. It was also corrupt, selling indulgences with popes claiming infallibility and being a law unto themselves.
Failure of the Church to recognize and deal with change fueled dissension and gave birth to the Reformation. The Protestant Movement was rich in leadership with such men as John Calvin. The French theologian created a unique and far reaching doctrine of “The Elected." You could tell who were among the elected by their discipline, dedication, frugality, morality, devotion and success. This gave birth to what Max Weber called “the Protestant work ethic,” and ultimately to capitalism. White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs) came to dominate this economic system across Europe. The irony of this is not lost on our present situation.
GENESIS OF “IN PRAISE OF FOLLY”
In a general sense, we are an accidental race in which Folly has always been our guide. Erasmus was recovering from an attack of back pain, and resting at the home of his English friend, Sir Thomas More author of “Utopia” (1516), when he wrote the little book “In Praise of Folly.”
It was not until two years after the book was written (1511) that Erasmus had the book secretly printed in France. The fact that there were at least seven editions within months of this first printing provides a measure of its immediate success and popularity. Because of this work Erasmus became one of the most popular men of letters of his time, and consequently, one of the most influential.
In a letter to Sir Thomas he wrote:
“On returning from Italy, I chose to amuse myself with the Praise of Folly (Moria). What Pallas, you will say, put that into my head? Well, the first thing that struck me was your surname, More, which is just as near the name of Moria or Folly . . . I surmised that this playful production of our genius would find special favor with you, disposed as you are to take pleasure in a jest of this kind . . . For, as nothing is more trifling than to treat serious questions frivolously, so nothing is more amusing than to treat trifles in such a way as to show yourself anything but a trifler.”
This last sentence is key to Folly. The book is a witty sermon, an earnest satire, a joke with an ethical purpose, mockery with a moral. Folly was meant to be a shrewd blow directed at superstitions and human foibles. Erasmus intended to get beyond lampoons. He knew people deprived of power often sought revenge on their masters by heaping them with ridicule thus tempering despotism with epigrams. Political editorial cartoons do it today. He chose to be subtler.
Erasmus was not the first to use this device nor will he be the last, but it is striking how much his own observations and biases grace the pages. Folly speaks of what is rotten in the Church and state, something he himself had seen. When Folly satirizes the pope, it is his own pope Julius II he has in mind. When Folly points to the stupidity of theologians, he is drawing from the painstaking studies of his fellow theologians.
In earlier works, satire was a dagger or a scourge, but with Erasmus it is a mirror. True, all satire starts with the axiom that the world is full of fools, but where others take this to heart with indignation painting Folly as wickedness and at wickedness as Folly, Erasmus finds the idea infinitely amusing. So, Folly in his hands is personified as neither vice nor stupidity, but a quite charming naiveté, the natural impulse of the child or the unsophisticated man.
Folly is no grim demon, but an amiable gossip that sees everything and reports it candidly rather than as a malignant force. Folly is what it is.
Erasmus is saying, without Folly, society would tumble on its ears, and the human race would die. Then he gives his take on some human conundrums: what calculating wise man or woman would take the risk of marrying and bringing up children? Would women or children have any attraction without Folly?
Erasmus is convinced that the act of procreation is one that no wise man would willingly perform. Without Folly, he says there would be more care than pleasure; without her there would be no family for marriages would be few and divorces many. He goes on: without Folly there would be neither society nor government at all, arguing, do not the wisest legislators recognize the necessity of fooling the people most of the time?
Socrates, he says, shows good sense in declaring philosophers should be kept far from politics, while Plato lacks good sense in thinking philosopher kings are history’s answer to man’s dilemma. Folly points to the miserable state of the Church and government when philosophers have ruled them. In our time, Eric Hoffer states it bluntly, “Give intellectuals everything but power.”
Folly has allegiance to no one. She finds medicine mainly quackery and lawyers little more than shysters. Men, she says, would be far better off if they lived in a state of nature according to their instincts. Folly finds the wisest men are the most wretched, fools and idiots, adding, “unfrighted by bugbear tales of another world” are far happier. She reflects, “How much pleasure comes from hobbies which are mere foolishness! Or man delights in hunting, another in building, a third in gaming, but a sage despises all such frivolity.”
Folly has much fun with the follies of superstition. She sees the analogy between the worship of the saints and ancient polytheism: Polyphemus has become Christopher to keep his devotion safe; St. Erasmus gives them wealth; St. George is but the Christian Hercules, “but what shall I say of those who flatter themselves with the cheat of pardons and indulgences?” These fools think they can buy not only all the blessings and pleasures of life, but heaven hereafter. What is worse, priests encourage them in their error for the sake of filthy lucre.
Each nation has its own pet foibles as well. England boasts handsome women; Scots are of gentle blood; the French intrigue is good breeding; and the Italians is their eloquence.
Nor do the wise escape having their own peculiar foibles. No race of men is more miserable than students of literature, Folly declares: “When anyone after a great deal of poring, spell out the inscriptions on some battered monument, Lord! What joy, what triumph, what congratulations upon his success, as if he had conquered Africa, or taken Babylon the Great!”
As for scientists or “natural philosophers, Folly has this to say:
“How sweetly they rave when they build themselves innumerable worlds, when they measure the sun, moon, stars, and spheres as though with a tape to an inch, when they explain the cause of thunder, the winds, eclipses, and other inexplicable phenomena, never hesitating, as though they were the private secretaries of creative Nature or had descended from the council of the gods to us, while in the meantime Nature magnificently laughs at them and at their conjectures.”
But for Folly the theology of the divines is still more ridiculous:
“They will explain the precise manner in which original sin is derived from our first parents; they will satisfy you in what manner, by what degrees and in how long a time our Savior was conceived in the Virgin’s womb, and demonstrate how in the consecrated wafer the accidents can exist without the substance. Nay, these are accounted trivial, easy questions; they have greater difficulties behind, which, nevertheless, they solve with as much expedition as the former – namely, whether supernatural generation requires any instant of time? Whether Christ, as a son, bears a double, especially distinct relation to God the Father and his Virgin Mother? Whether it would be possible for the first person of the Trinity to hate the second? Whether God, who took our nature upon him in the form of a man, could as well have become a woman, a devil, an ass, a gourd, or a stone?”
Folly enumerates the stupidities, and injustices done by the monks, who insist that ignorance is the first essential, by kings and courtiers, by pope and cardinals whose lives contrast so painfully with their professions.
“I was lately,” Folly continues, “at a theological discussion, for I often go to such meetings, when some one asked what authority there was in the Bible for burning heretics instead of convincing them by argument? A certain hard old man, a theologian by the very look of him, not without a great deal of disdain, answered that it was the express injunction of St. Paul, when he said: ‘A man that is an heretic after the first and second admonition reject.’ When he yelled these words over and over again and some were wondering what had struck the man, he finally explained that Paul meant that the heretic must be put out of life. Some burst out laughing, but others seemed to think this interpretation perfectly theological.”
* * * * * *
Although written five hundred years ago, the book remains an effective examination of man’s aspirations, inclinations, indulgences and vanities, which seem never to escape feeling as contemporary as if written moments ago. Folly gives the modern reader an idea of the chaotic struggle people have always had to face in cutting through the hypocrisy of their times. It was feudalism, Catholicism, and sanctimonious corruption in the days of Erasmus. It is corpocracy, theocracy, genocide, homicide, suicide, preemptive war, and meretricious greed that corrupt ours.
Erasmus put a mirror up to his time. Others of us far less gifted have attempted to do the same to ours; knowing man being man will persist in the folly of his ways nonetheless.
Folly is also a book about individualism and freedom. Protestantism and capitalism were inextricably fused in individualism. It was a time men were persecuted unless they submitted to a life in which they exercised no choices of their own. Every door was blocked from them no matter how noble their character. They could not “sin against truth,” but whose truth, certainly not their own? Erasmus made this truth Folly’s truth.
Erasmus could see the modern world was being born, that men were bent on a life of their own to live as they saw fit. Luther put this into theology declaring the individual could seek salvation through faith alone rather in human works; that man could address his concerns directly to God rather than have a priest act as his intercessor in the Sacrament of Confession.
People were ripe for change with a growing army of protesters against exploitation and humiliation, against the intrusion of public authority in their private lives. The Church was dying, as was its mass hypnosis of custom and organized propaganda failing. Epigrams flourished in these times connecting Erasmus and Luther: e.g., “Erasmus laid the eggs and Luther hatched the chickens”; “Erasmus is the father of Luther”; and “Luther, Zwingli and Erasmus are the soldiers of Pilate, who crucify Christ.” These noxious gems studded the sermons of many Catholic priests who were convinced Erasmus started the Reformation, and when he in fact was one of the fathers of the Counter Reformation.
* * * * * *
Sixty years earlier in 1455, Guttenberg had invented the movable type, and now Luther could translate the bible into German and disseminate across the country. This fueled reading, education and nationalism, which in turn spread throughout Europe as the bible was translated into dozens of European languages. Individualism, once much disputed and maligned as a concept of man, was now on the march.
Folly is a mirror of her times and wonders if man is ready to leave the cave’s darkness that man knows so well for the light that might blind him. Folly wasn’t taking wagers. She knows man wants to continue doing everything that he is now doing, and to retain everything that he has always had without sacrifice, risk or pain. Folly took pleasure in exposing this human condition.
Erasmus wrote this book when society was uncoupling itself from the feudal system with the lowly merchant class emerging from the docks to take charge of commerce with the complexion and character of society being based increasingly on performance rather than birth, pomp, ritual and circumstance.
WHY "IN PRAISE OF FOLLY" IS A PALLIATIVE TO OUR TIMES
Folly is the orator of Erasmus’ own concerns; her subject is society and morality and the faulty confidence of the time. Folly quickly becomes a many-sided symbol that stands for all that is natural in man, for his misdirected effort, and for all of his attempts to get the wrong things out of life.
She discusses the problem of man’s wisdom and tells how it can be united with man’s action to gain success in a world of Folly. She is concerned with the way in which reason and simple moral advice can be presented to mankind. She wonders what the secular humanists, who reject the supernatural and stress only individual dignity, worth, and self-realization, can do for man and the world.
Parody, irony, and satire are used throughout the work to show man what he does and what he has harvested. No one is spared: not king or prince, not pope or priest, not aristocrat or workingman.
Folly is preoccupied with her passion for Youth, and lists among her followers Drunkenness, Ignorance, Self-love, Flattery, Forgetfulness, Laziness, Pleasure, Madness, Sensuality, Intemperance, and Sound Sleep.
All these followers help her to gain control of all things in society. Folly goes on to say that she is the source of all that is pleasurable in life. She insists man will never be completely free from her because he is ruled more by passion than by reason, and the two most important aspects of passion are anger and lust, and he is shrunken by both.
Folly praises herself under the guise of Prudence because she allows man to have first-hand experience with the world. She frees man from shame and fear, which clouds his mind and inhibits his actions, thus preventing him from any real experience.
Because of Prudence man goes along with the crowd, which is Folly. Indeed, it is Folly who has caused all the great achievements of mankind, yet wisdom and learning are no great help to relieve man’s anxiety.
Self-love, self-importance, and flattery motivate everything that man does. To lead such a life of Folly, error, and ignorance is to be human. It is to express one’s nature. All other forms of life are satisfied with limitations but man is vainly ambitious. Folly concludes the most ignorant men are the happiest and some of the most deluded men are those who delight in telling lies.
Erasmus, who was a priest, chides priests, who Folly sees as relying on magic, charms, relics, prayers, saints and particular rites to create the delusion of happiness. Priests are conjurers of deception. Man cannot find happiness without Folly, since all emotions belong to Folly, and happiness depends on expressing our nature, which is full of Folly.
One of the most foolish of men, Folly insists, is that person who tries to deny his true nature through religion. Folly proves that religion has more to do with her own nature than with wisdom by showing that children, women, old people and fools take more delight in it than anyone else. It is they who are always nearest the altars.
In the way that religion is taught and practiced, man must deny his true nature by disdaining life and preferring death. He must overlook injuries, avoid pleasure, and feast on hunger, vigils, tears, and labors. He must give up and score all physical pleasures, or at the very least take them more lightly than he does spiritual pleasures.
Folly is most serious when she tells man that this is the most foolish way, and the only sure way to true happiness. Only by forgetting his body and everything physical can man approach this goal. He must give himself up completely to the spiritual aspects of life in order to achieve it.
Only a very few men are able to accomplish this task completely enough while in this world, Folly concedes. This is because in order to approach such an experience is very close to madness. This madness, in turn, is similar to the heavenly joys that one will experience after death when the spirit has completely left the body.
Erasmus had sympathy for The Protestant Reformation, but decided to stay in the Church and lead the Counter Reformation. Historians are divided as to whether this was courageous or cowardly. In this dichotomy, he is not unlike many of our current opinion makers: that is, a man of reflection rather than action. He wanted to preserve things as they were and to deny intellectually as much as possible things as they were becoming. Unlike Martin Luther or Sir Thomas More, he was unwilling to put his life and mind on the line, but instead retreated into parody. He remained committed to inevitable change but not actively involved in it.
Luther changed the world. Erasmus put the bite of sarcasm into his world without engendering any radical change. Still, he composed this work in seven days five hundred years ago and it is still read.
We live in an Age of Anxiety with the definition of many things not only in jeopardy, but in mass confusion: from political ideologies to economic systems, from what constitutes a society to what defines a nation, from military engagement to coping with subversive terrorism, from balance of power to material-spiritual stability, from individualism to multiculturalism, from the primacy of religious freedom to the prudence of authority.
Erasmus, too, lived in an Age of Anxiety with the collapse of feudalism and the birth of the great universities in a climate of low literacy. It was a time when science was lifting the fog of mythology. Nations were being formed around discrete languages and common cultures. This disruption was like a constant earthquake across the Western world. Only a few years previously America had been discovered which threw all of Aristotle’s benchmarks into question.
So, in reading In Praise of Folly, it should come as little surprise that its irreverent humor and self-deprecating style should have lightened the heavy heart of the times. But today, I see no Erasmus-like essayist; no analysis of our follies, foibles and vanities that speaks with such eloquence as his words did five hundred years ago. It is partisan politics, partisan academics, partisan theologies, partisan cultures, and even partisan genders, as if the human race were tainted with a divided soul. Dr. Szasz writes in “Ceremonial Chemistry”:
“It seems clear that only in accepting human beings for what they are can we accept the chemical substances they use for what they are: in short, only insofar as we are able and willing to accept men, women, and children as neither angels nor devils, but as persons with certain inalienable rights and irrepudiable (sic) duties, shall we be able and willing to accept heroin, cocaine, and marijuana as neither panaceas nor panapathogens, but as drugs with certain chemical properties and ceremonial possibilities.”
Szasz is not advocating drug addiction, but realistic dealing with people as they are. This should extend across the board.
* * * * * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 20, 2009
REFERENCE: This is another excerpt from Confident Thinking.
* * * * * *
“Purely intellectual as Erasmus was, he could not be a partisan, not because of timidity, but because he saw good and the bad of all sides. He would not follow Luther, because he had mixed some evil with his good; he could not wish him utterly crushed, because of the Pharisees in the Catholic Church. He was always making exceptions, discovering distinctions, and toning down an otherwise too glaring statement. He could hardly write anything without some hedging, some slight doubt as to the unqualified validity of what he said. He, almost alone in his age, knew that truth had many faces, that no rule can be without exceptions, and that no position is unassailable.”
Preserved Smith, Erasmus: A Study of His Life, Ideals and Place in History (1923)
* * * * * *
If I have given the impression it is not healthy to see the Folly of our ways, I apologize because that is what is needed in troubled times. Folly is the foil to taking ourselves too seriously. The global economic meltdown of 2008, leading to the Recession of 2009 and beyond was fueled by panic, which is the bride of Folly. The investment bank of Bear Stearns had cash reserves of $18 billion when panic led to gloom and gloom led a raid on the bank.
A week later Bear Stearns was almost broke with its stock price plummeting from three digits to two digits and then to one digit, requiring a massive Federal Government “Bail Out.” This Folly is a reminder of the inaugural speech of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he took office in 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression, saying, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
FDR was well acquainted with Folly. Our actions indicate Folly does not have to be totally irrational when it is the bride of panic. After all, it has been scholars and learned men, some even called “wise men,” who have gotten us into these straits.
Plato reminds us, “We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” He was thinking of Folly. Absurd as the subprime real estate fiasco, or the run on the banks have proven to be, Confident Thinking was the greatest casualty. We sometimes forget it is personal trust that has always been the key to our survival.
Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman prefaces his televised remarks by assuring us “how smart” these financial people are running our economy. There is a touch of Folly here. Writer Studs Terkel, who lived through the Great Depression and wrote about it (“Hard Times”), tells us, “The lessons learned are that the big boys running the economy are not all that bright.” Folly is the palliative to gloom.
THE ANATOMY OF FOLLY – THE FINANCIAL MELTDOWN OF 2008
While we are busy applauding ourselves on how wise, sophisticated and advanced we are in the annals of human history, something happened in the first quarter of 2008 to remind us how prescient Erasmus (1466 – 1536) was 500 years ago, when he wrote “In Praise of Folly” (1509).
In the Spring of 2008, the subprime real estate bubble burst and the housing market crashed. There followed a run on the Wall Street investment bank, Bear Stearns. The banking stock was then trading for $171 per share. Company employees own 30 percent of the stock. Folly believed in the company.
Rumor fed by fear collapsed into panic and spread like a contagion. In 48 hours the stock was trading for $60. Alan Greenberg, a company executive, said there was no reason for the panic; that Bear Stearns had cash reserves of $18 billion. Before the week was out toxic assets consumed that cash reserve.
Bear Stearns didn’t invent greed but it drank from its polluted wells, buying hundreds of thousands of mortgages, bundling them up into securities, and then reselling them to investors. It was a formula for disaster but the best and the brightest thought it could be contained. Folly always wears a mask of confidence.
Morgan Stanley, the Federal Reserve, and the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) now took notice believing it was a manageable situation and not an avalanche. They were wrong.
Folly convinced itself that this nightmare would never occur as all Wall Street firms were bundled together in what are called “credit default swaps” (CDS). These are a form of insurance, which secures bonds. Bear Stearns, like everyone else, paid a nominal fee for this insurance with no intention of ever being forced to pay the face value of the bonds. It held $100s of billions in CDS, as did all of Wall Street, as did investment banks across the globe to the tune of $ trillions.
So incestuous were these financial arrangements on Wall Street that everyone was plugged in and connected to everyone else. A cascade of failures was not only imminent but seem inevitable. Folly ruled the waves. Nothing in living memory approached the potential calamity envisioned.
Secretary of Treasurer Hank Paulsen and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke were on the hot seat. Something had to be done. Bear Sterns was an unregulated investment bank, and money couldn’t be lent directly to it.
Bernanke got around this legality by giving $30 billion to J. P. Morgan to rescue Bear Sterns and assume control of its toxic securities. This was not an easy decision.
Two ideas were in play: “systemic risk,” that is, that failure was not an option as it would systemically cause irrevocably damage; and “moral hazard,” that is, the damage was self-inflicted and therefore those responsible should be punished by taking it on the chin.
Choosing the “systemic risk” option Paulsen and Bernanke thought they had stopped the leak in the financial dike. They were wrong. Their folly spelled “F-A-I-L-U-R-E” to Wall Street with the DOW Jones Industrials plunging 500 points, while Bear Stearns traded at $30.
This was not the end of Folly. Secretary Paulsen, a Republican who believed in “moral hazard,” wanted to punish Bear Stearns investors. He had J. P. Morgan pay stockholders of record $2 per share, when a little over a week before the stock was trading for $171 per share. Bear Stearns was now gone with many employees cleaned out of their jobs, life savings and stock portfolios. Employees cried openly without embarrassment as they felt they had done nothing wrong. With Folly, it is not necessary.
The tragic comedy was repeated with Fannie Mae and Freddie Max, two publicly traded companies that held more than $5 trillion in home mortgages. During this same period, these two firms lost 60 percent of their stock value. Systemic risk now ruled the decisions of our dynamic dual, as Paulsen and Bernanke had the Federal Government take over Fannie and Freddie. These are two of the largest companies in the world, proving that no company is too large to fail.
Next it was the investment bank Lehman Brothers, a company dominated by its CEO, Richard S. Fuld, Folly personified. He “was the company.” People cowered to him so he came to believe himself invincible, and thus ruled as if an anointed king with the swagger and arrogance of a financial Lone Ranger. He sought high-risk mortgages and wouldn’t listen to any of his people who sensed catastrophe. Nothing can touch Folly.
On a personal level, Paulsen and Fuld had gone head-to-head as competitors when Paulsen ran Morgan Stanley. Now, “it’s not my fault” Fuld was expecting the government to bail out Lehman Brothers as it had Bear Stearns. Folly is not too reflective. It didn’t happen. Paulsen applied his policy of “moral hazard.” Lehman Brothers went into bankruptcy and evaporated into the firmament.
Now, in the Fall of 2008 with American International Group, Inc. (AIG) holding $ billions of CDS of Lehman Brothers, capital is frozen. Banks are unable to borrow money. $ Trillions of debt threatens to put the global economy into another Great Depression. Systemic risk is now the policy of choice. The government loans $85 billion to AIG and takes 80 percent ownership of the company. This happened only two days after Lehman Brothers collapsed.
Still on the offensive, Paulsen and Bernanke pushed through Congress – on the second vote – a $700 billion “Bail Out” bill to purchase toxic mortgage securities. Congress had never acted so fast or with no chance to debate or modify the three and one-half page bill. Most Congressional bills take weeks if not months to establish consensus in committee before even coming to a vote, and then they run typically into the hundreds of pages. Congress was motivated to act quickly as the Dow Jones Industrials dropped 777 points after that first vote.
Next, Paulsen and Bernanke called the CEOs of the nine largest banks in the country to Washington, DC, sat them down, and told them the score. A capital injection of $ billions was to be made available to them to unfreeze the credit crunch. These CEOs were given a one-page non-negotiable document to take home, and return signed the next day. All nine CEOs signed. Within a week they had $125 billion. $350 billion of the “bail out” money had been spent already.
If you get the impression the dynamic dual were flying by the seat of their pants as Folly, that Paulsen and Bernanke had no overarching plan, that they were reacting rather than acting, stay tuned. You’ve heard nothing yet. Folly has been passed on to President Barak Obama. He has successfully badgered Congress into approving his nearly $ trillion “stimulus package” of 2009, which has a striking similar DNA to $700 billion predecessor.
THE MORE THINGS GO AROUND THEY COME AROUND
Erasmus lived in an equally chaotic period in Western civilization. Six years after he published “In Praise of Folly” (1511), Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the Castle Church door in Wittenberg, Germany (1517). Pope Leo X excommunicated the theologian for his heresy in 1521. Pope Clement VII excommunicated King Henry VIII in 1533 after the king divorced and remarried in defiance of Rome's refusal to annul his marriage. The king then formed the Church of England. Sir Thomas More, devoted friend of the king, was beheaded in 1535 for his refusal to vow allegiance to the king as his spiritual leader, remaining loyal to Rome to the end.
Erasmus and More were good friends, but very different men. Erasmus wrote “In Praise of Folly” in England while visiting Sir Thomas, but published it secretly and anonymously in France. Both men were rational intellectual leaders of the Renaissance, but of differing discretionary persuasions. Erasmus chose to work mainly behind the scenes of the Counter Reformation while Sir Thomas gave his life. Erasmus died a year after his friend was beheaded at age 70. More was 57 at his death.
It was religion, not finance that controlled the minds of men of the time. The Roman Catholic Church, which had been all-powerful since the Middle Ages, was declining. It was also corrupt, selling indulgences with popes claiming infallibility and being a law unto themselves.
Failure of the Church to recognize and deal with change fueled dissension and gave birth to the Reformation. The Protestant Movement was rich in leadership with such men as John Calvin. The French theologian created a unique and far reaching doctrine of “The Elected." You could tell who were among the elected by their discipline, dedication, frugality, morality, devotion and success. This gave birth to what Max Weber called “the Protestant work ethic,” and ultimately to capitalism. White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs) came to dominate this economic system across Europe. The irony of this is not lost on our present situation.
GENESIS OF “IN PRAISE OF FOLLY”
In a general sense, we are an accidental race in which Folly has always been our guide. Erasmus was recovering from an attack of back pain, and resting at the home of his English friend, Sir Thomas More author of “Utopia” (1516), when he wrote the little book “In Praise of Folly.”
It was not until two years after the book was written (1511) that Erasmus had the book secretly printed in France. The fact that there were at least seven editions within months of this first printing provides a measure of its immediate success and popularity. Because of this work Erasmus became one of the most popular men of letters of his time, and consequently, one of the most influential.
In a letter to Sir Thomas he wrote:
“On returning from Italy, I chose to amuse myself with the Praise of Folly (Moria). What Pallas, you will say, put that into my head? Well, the first thing that struck me was your surname, More, which is just as near the name of Moria or Folly . . . I surmised that this playful production of our genius would find special favor with you, disposed as you are to take pleasure in a jest of this kind . . . For, as nothing is more trifling than to treat serious questions frivolously, so nothing is more amusing than to treat trifles in such a way as to show yourself anything but a trifler.”
This last sentence is key to Folly. The book is a witty sermon, an earnest satire, a joke with an ethical purpose, mockery with a moral. Folly was meant to be a shrewd blow directed at superstitions and human foibles. Erasmus intended to get beyond lampoons. He knew people deprived of power often sought revenge on their masters by heaping them with ridicule thus tempering despotism with epigrams. Political editorial cartoons do it today. He chose to be subtler.
Erasmus was not the first to use this device nor will he be the last, but it is striking how much his own observations and biases grace the pages. Folly speaks of what is rotten in the Church and state, something he himself had seen. When Folly satirizes the pope, it is his own pope Julius II he has in mind. When Folly points to the stupidity of theologians, he is drawing from the painstaking studies of his fellow theologians.
In earlier works, satire was a dagger or a scourge, but with Erasmus it is a mirror. True, all satire starts with the axiom that the world is full of fools, but where others take this to heart with indignation painting Folly as wickedness and at wickedness as Folly, Erasmus finds the idea infinitely amusing. So, Folly in his hands is personified as neither vice nor stupidity, but a quite charming naiveté, the natural impulse of the child or the unsophisticated man.
Folly is no grim demon, but an amiable gossip that sees everything and reports it candidly rather than as a malignant force. Folly is what it is.
Erasmus is saying, without Folly, society would tumble on its ears, and the human race would die. Then he gives his take on some human conundrums: what calculating wise man or woman would take the risk of marrying and bringing up children? Would women or children have any attraction without Folly?
Erasmus is convinced that the act of procreation is one that no wise man would willingly perform. Without Folly, he says there would be more care than pleasure; without her there would be no family for marriages would be few and divorces many. He goes on: without Folly there would be neither society nor government at all, arguing, do not the wisest legislators recognize the necessity of fooling the people most of the time?
Socrates, he says, shows good sense in declaring philosophers should be kept far from politics, while Plato lacks good sense in thinking philosopher kings are history’s answer to man’s dilemma. Folly points to the miserable state of the Church and government when philosophers have ruled them. In our time, Eric Hoffer states it bluntly, “Give intellectuals everything but power.”
Folly has allegiance to no one. She finds medicine mainly quackery and lawyers little more than shysters. Men, she says, would be far better off if they lived in a state of nature according to their instincts. Folly finds the wisest men are the most wretched, fools and idiots, adding, “unfrighted by bugbear tales of another world” are far happier. She reflects, “How much pleasure comes from hobbies which are mere foolishness! Or man delights in hunting, another in building, a third in gaming, but a sage despises all such frivolity.”
Folly has much fun with the follies of superstition. She sees the analogy between the worship of the saints and ancient polytheism: Polyphemus has become Christopher to keep his devotion safe; St. Erasmus gives them wealth; St. George is but the Christian Hercules, “but what shall I say of those who flatter themselves with the cheat of pardons and indulgences?” These fools think they can buy not only all the blessings and pleasures of life, but heaven hereafter. What is worse, priests encourage them in their error for the sake of filthy lucre.
Each nation has its own pet foibles as well. England boasts handsome women; Scots are of gentle blood; the French intrigue is good breeding; and the Italians is their eloquence.
Nor do the wise escape having their own peculiar foibles. No race of men is more miserable than students of literature, Folly declares: “When anyone after a great deal of poring, spell out the inscriptions on some battered monument, Lord! What joy, what triumph, what congratulations upon his success, as if he had conquered Africa, or taken Babylon the Great!”
As for scientists or “natural philosophers, Folly has this to say:
“How sweetly they rave when they build themselves innumerable worlds, when they measure the sun, moon, stars, and spheres as though with a tape to an inch, when they explain the cause of thunder, the winds, eclipses, and other inexplicable phenomena, never hesitating, as though they were the private secretaries of creative Nature or had descended from the council of the gods to us, while in the meantime Nature magnificently laughs at them and at their conjectures.”
But for Folly the theology of the divines is still more ridiculous:
“They will explain the precise manner in which original sin is derived from our first parents; they will satisfy you in what manner, by what degrees and in how long a time our Savior was conceived in the Virgin’s womb, and demonstrate how in the consecrated wafer the accidents can exist without the substance. Nay, these are accounted trivial, easy questions; they have greater difficulties behind, which, nevertheless, they solve with as much expedition as the former – namely, whether supernatural generation requires any instant of time? Whether Christ, as a son, bears a double, especially distinct relation to God the Father and his Virgin Mother? Whether it would be possible for the first person of the Trinity to hate the second? Whether God, who took our nature upon him in the form of a man, could as well have become a woman, a devil, an ass, a gourd, or a stone?”
Folly enumerates the stupidities, and injustices done by the monks, who insist that ignorance is the first essential, by kings and courtiers, by pope and cardinals whose lives contrast so painfully with their professions.
“I was lately,” Folly continues, “at a theological discussion, for I often go to such meetings, when some one asked what authority there was in the Bible for burning heretics instead of convincing them by argument? A certain hard old man, a theologian by the very look of him, not without a great deal of disdain, answered that it was the express injunction of St. Paul, when he said: ‘A man that is an heretic after the first and second admonition reject.’ When he yelled these words over and over again and some were wondering what had struck the man, he finally explained that Paul meant that the heretic must be put out of life. Some burst out laughing, but others seemed to think this interpretation perfectly theological.”
* * * * * *
Although written five hundred years ago, the book remains an effective examination of man’s aspirations, inclinations, indulgences and vanities, which seem never to escape feeling as contemporary as if written moments ago. Folly gives the modern reader an idea of the chaotic struggle people have always had to face in cutting through the hypocrisy of their times. It was feudalism, Catholicism, and sanctimonious corruption in the days of Erasmus. It is corpocracy, theocracy, genocide, homicide, suicide, preemptive war, and meretricious greed that corrupt ours.
Erasmus put a mirror up to his time. Others of us far less gifted have attempted to do the same to ours; knowing man being man will persist in the folly of his ways nonetheless.
Folly is also a book about individualism and freedom. Protestantism and capitalism were inextricably fused in individualism. It was a time men were persecuted unless they submitted to a life in which they exercised no choices of their own. Every door was blocked from them no matter how noble their character. They could not “sin against truth,” but whose truth, certainly not their own? Erasmus made this truth Folly’s truth.
Erasmus could see the modern world was being born, that men were bent on a life of their own to live as they saw fit. Luther put this into theology declaring the individual could seek salvation through faith alone rather in human works; that man could address his concerns directly to God rather than have a priest act as his intercessor in the Sacrament of Confession.
People were ripe for change with a growing army of protesters against exploitation and humiliation, against the intrusion of public authority in their private lives. The Church was dying, as was its mass hypnosis of custom and organized propaganda failing. Epigrams flourished in these times connecting Erasmus and Luther: e.g., “Erasmus laid the eggs and Luther hatched the chickens”; “Erasmus is the father of Luther”; and “Luther, Zwingli and Erasmus are the soldiers of Pilate, who crucify Christ.” These noxious gems studded the sermons of many Catholic priests who were convinced Erasmus started the Reformation, and when he in fact was one of the fathers of the Counter Reformation.
* * * * * *
Sixty years earlier in 1455, Guttenberg had invented the movable type, and now Luther could translate the bible into German and disseminate across the country. This fueled reading, education and nationalism, which in turn spread throughout Europe as the bible was translated into dozens of European languages. Individualism, once much disputed and maligned as a concept of man, was now on the march.
Folly is a mirror of her times and wonders if man is ready to leave the cave’s darkness that man knows so well for the light that might blind him. Folly wasn’t taking wagers. She knows man wants to continue doing everything that he is now doing, and to retain everything that he has always had without sacrifice, risk or pain. Folly took pleasure in exposing this human condition.
Erasmus wrote this book when society was uncoupling itself from the feudal system with the lowly merchant class emerging from the docks to take charge of commerce with the complexion and character of society being based increasingly on performance rather than birth, pomp, ritual and circumstance.
WHY "IN PRAISE OF FOLLY" IS A PALLIATIVE TO OUR TIMES
Folly is the orator of Erasmus’ own concerns; her subject is society and morality and the faulty confidence of the time. Folly quickly becomes a many-sided symbol that stands for all that is natural in man, for his misdirected effort, and for all of his attempts to get the wrong things out of life.
She discusses the problem of man’s wisdom and tells how it can be united with man’s action to gain success in a world of Folly. She is concerned with the way in which reason and simple moral advice can be presented to mankind. She wonders what the secular humanists, who reject the supernatural and stress only individual dignity, worth, and self-realization, can do for man and the world.
Parody, irony, and satire are used throughout the work to show man what he does and what he has harvested. No one is spared: not king or prince, not pope or priest, not aristocrat or workingman.
Folly is preoccupied with her passion for Youth, and lists among her followers Drunkenness, Ignorance, Self-love, Flattery, Forgetfulness, Laziness, Pleasure, Madness, Sensuality, Intemperance, and Sound Sleep.
All these followers help her to gain control of all things in society. Folly goes on to say that she is the source of all that is pleasurable in life. She insists man will never be completely free from her because he is ruled more by passion than by reason, and the two most important aspects of passion are anger and lust, and he is shrunken by both.
Folly praises herself under the guise of Prudence because she allows man to have first-hand experience with the world. She frees man from shame and fear, which clouds his mind and inhibits his actions, thus preventing him from any real experience.
Because of Prudence man goes along with the crowd, which is Folly. Indeed, it is Folly who has caused all the great achievements of mankind, yet wisdom and learning are no great help to relieve man’s anxiety.
Self-love, self-importance, and flattery motivate everything that man does. To lead such a life of Folly, error, and ignorance is to be human. It is to express one’s nature. All other forms of life are satisfied with limitations but man is vainly ambitious. Folly concludes the most ignorant men are the happiest and some of the most deluded men are those who delight in telling lies.
Erasmus, who was a priest, chides priests, who Folly sees as relying on magic, charms, relics, prayers, saints and particular rites to create the delusion of happiness. Priests are conjurers of deception. Man cannot find happiness without Folly, since all emotions belong to Folly, and happiness depends on expressing our nature, which is full of Folly.
One of the most foolish of men, Folly insists, is that person who tries to deny his true nature through religion. Folly proves that religion has more to do with her own nature than with wisdom by showing that children, women, old people and fools take more delight in it than anyone else. It is they who are always nearest the altars.
In the way that religion is taught and practiced, man must deny his true nature by disdaining life and preferring death. He must overlook injuries, avoid pleasure, and feast on hunger, vigils, tears, and labors. He must give up and score all physical pleasures, or at the very least take them more lightly than he does spiritual pleasures.
Folly is most serious when she tells man that this is the most foolish way, and the only sure way to true happiness. Only by forgetting his body and everything physical can man approach this goal. He must give himself up completely to the spiritual aspects of life in order to achieve it.
Only a very few men are able to accomplish this task completely enough while in this world, Folly concedes. This is because in order to approach such an experience is very close to madness. This madness, in turn, is similar to the heavenly joys that one will experience after death when the spirit has completely left the body.
Erasmus had sympathy for The Protestant Reformation, but decided to stay in the Church and lead the Counter Reformation. Historians are divided as to whether this was courageous or cowardly. In this dichotomy, he is not unlike many of our current opinion makers: that is, a man of reflection rather than action. He wanted to preserve things as they were and to deny intellectually as much as possible things as they were becoming. Unlike Martin Luther or Sir Thomas More, he was unwilling to put his life and mind on the line, but instead retreated into parody. He remained committed to inevitable change but not actively involved in it.
Luther changed the world. Erasmus put the bite of sarcasm into his world without engendering any radical change. Still, he composed this work in seven days five hundred years ago and it is still read.
We live in an Age of Anxiety with the definition of many things not only in jeopardy, but in mass confusion: from political ideologies to economic systems, from what constitutes a society to what defines a nation, from military engagement to coping with subversive terrorism, from balance of power to material-spiritual stability, from individualism to multiculturalism, from the primacy of religious freedom to the prudence of authority.
Erasmus, too, lived in an Age of Anxiety with the collapse of feudalism and the birth of the great universities in a climate of low literacy. It was a time when science was lifting the fog of mythology. Nations were being formed around discrete languages and common cultures. This disruption was like a constant earthquake across the Western world. Only a few years previously America had been discovered which threw all of Aristotle’s benchmarks into question.
So, in reading In Praise of Folly, it should come as little surprise that its irreverent humor and self-deprecating style should have lightened the heavy heart of the times. But today, I see no Erasmus-like essayist; no analysis of our follies, foibles and vanities that speaks with such eloquence as his words did five hundred years ago. It is partisan politics, partisan academics, partisan theologies, partisan cultures, and even partisan genders, as if the human race were tainted with a divided soul. Dr. Szasz writes in “Ceremonial Chemistry”:
“It seems clear that only in accepting human beings for what they are can we accept the chemical substances they use for what they are: in short, only insofar as we are able and willing to accept men, women, and children as neither angels nor devils, but as persons with certain inalienable rights and irrepudiable (sic) duties, shall we be able and willing to accept heroin, cocaine, and marijuana as neither panaceas nor panapathogens, but as drugs with certain chemical properties and ceremonial possibilities.”
Szasz is not advocating drug addiction, but realistic dealing with people as they are. This should extend across the board.
* * * * * *
Thursday, February 19, 2009
HUMOR PALLIATIVE TO DEPRESSION!
HUMOR PALLIATIVE TO DEPRESSION!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 19, 2009
“There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.”
Irish playwright Samuel Beckett (1906 – 1989)
* * * * * *
REFERENCE:
This is a piece taken from the last chapter of CONFIDENT THINKING, which is titled, “Palliatives In An Anxious Age.”
* * * * * *
It would seem there is a emptiness to today's humor. It is obsessed with repetitive sexual innuendo, deprecating sarcasm and veiled schadenfreude, that is, to love a joke that pats us on the back and kicks the other guy down the stairs.
Often, professional comedians, who see themselves as carrying the mantle of humor, resort to self-deprecation to make connection. Rodney Dangerfield comes to mind. There are television programs in which viewers send in videos of unintended pratfalls, which show them in the most embarrassing light. Again, this is not humor. It is rather a monstrous conceit.
Humor lies under the umbrella of reason requiring the direction of subtle judgment as an expression of boundless freedom. Nineteenth century clergyman Henry Giles (1809 – 1882) has it about right:
“Wit may be a thing of pure imagination, but humor involves sentiment and character. Humor is of a genial quality; it dwells in the same character with pathos, and is always mingled with sensibility.”
We are a cognitive society proud of our rationality but too often reveal our toxic side in our humor. We forget that humor is the test of our significance, and our significance of humor. It issues not in baldy laughter but in still smiles, and rises from deep within us in shared understanding of our common vulnerability.
Humor gives us a sense of proportion. It restores balance during the most trying of times and can provide an important coping mechanism with infirmities, ill health, and other evils of life that catch us when we are least prepared for them. Humor laughs with people, not at them. A smile makes life more bearable, a hearty laugh adds a certain fragrance to the joy. English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 – 1863) saw humor as our best article of dress in public.
It should come as no surprise that true humor springs from the heart not the head. It is not contempt for one’s situation or one’s enemies, but the essence of love. There is certainly no defense against adversity save the humor of putting life into perspective. We cannot all have large bank accounts, live in the best of neighborhoods, or dress in designer clothes, but we can be the best society has to offer with a sense of humor.
We live in a world of perpetual posturing, a world of constant conflict and blatant contradiction. Affectation has become a norm. Nothing is what it seems, and no one is who he pretends to be. We are constantly reminded of this as we see the movers and shakers of society fall from grace.
Life has been reduced to caricature. We are all exaggerated forms of this disguise. There is the social coercion to be something different than what we are. So, inexplicably, we wax highly dignified for the attention. Humor penetrates this façade and restores a certain authenticity. Spanish philosopher George Santayana (1863 – 1952) writes:
“A world of masks is superimposed on reality, and passes in every sphere of human interest for the reality itself. Humor is the perception of this illusion, whilst the convention continues to be maintained, as if we had not observed its absurdity.”
With change constantly threatening to overwhelm us, we resort to all manner of checks and balances to give the impression we are in control when clearly we are not. This makes us stick figures on stage of a humorless production, and we would be well to realize it. The more we attempt to cover up the absurdity of our existence the more we fall prey to reinforcing it. The conventional world has been reduced to masks superimposed on reality. It is humor that penetrates this absurdity to provide us with a perception of the illusion.
Irish playwright Samuel Beckett (1906 – 1989) filled our emptiness with the comedy of the absurd. In “Waiting for Godot” (1956), Estragon and Vladimir, two music-hall-clown-like protagonists, claim there is “Nothing to be done” to change their plight. They haven’t abandon hope, however, as they wait for the always-deferred arrival of the mysterious Godot.
These two characters have an unfailing commitment to actionless action, but we cannot help but recognize how we share the same absurdity. We are constantly looking past the present to some nebulous future as a panacea. Some of us yearn for a new job, a perfect mate, a winning lottery ticket, or a savior in a political leader to turn our crumbling world around.
Meanwhile, we remain passive, reactive and miserable waiting for Godot, the embodiment of Hope to rescue us. Beckett’s point, and this is the healthiness of his humor, is to remind us all that we are trapped in the pathos and pointlessness of the waiting game as much as Vladimir and Estragon.
Alas, there is not much authentic humor; there is not much uninhibited joy; there is not much radiant patience; there is not much spirited camaraderie; there is not much mutual understanding; there is not much uncompetitive collegiality; there is not much level-headed reasoning; there is not much original scholarship; there is not much daring creativity; and there is little evidence of naked enthusiasm for the “god within,” which is humor’s complement.
A sense of humor entertains the sublime and ridiculous as they dance merrily together while being equally fathomed without stepping on each other’s toes or losing perspective. It is the acceptance of contradiction that allows one to function efficiently. The sublime and the ridiculous are the extreme coordinates of the rational that gives measure to humor to see things as they are, not as they are supposed to be.
There is no point in purging our soul of our biases. They are as much a part of our chemistry as every other aspect. Biases constitute our fragile filtering system of early conditioning, and then are refined by our culture. Acknowledged and accepted with humor, they are no longer impossible barriers to seeing the world as it is. Our biases remind us that a flea accidentally landing on an elephant would view the whole animal in that narrow perspective. We are not too far removed from fleas in that respect.
* * * * * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 19, 2009
“There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.”
Irish playwright Samuel Beckett (1906 – 1989)
* * * * * *
REFERENCE:
This is a piece taken from the last chapter of CONFIDENT THINKING, which is titled, “Palliatives In An Anxious Age.”
* * * * * *
It would seem there is a emptiness to today's humor. It is obsessed with repetitive sexual innuendo, deprecating sarcasm and veiled schadenfreude, that is, to love a joke that pats us on the back and kicks the other guy down the stairs.
Often, professional comedians, who see themselves as carrying the mantle of humor, resort to self-deprecation to make connection. Rodney Dangerfield comes to mind. There are television programs in which viewers send in videos of unintended pratfalls, which show them in the most embarrassing light. Again, this is not humor. It is rather a monstrous conceit.
Humor lies under the umbrella of reason requiring the direction of subtle judgment as an expression of boundless freedom. Nineteenth century clergyman Henry Giles (1809 – 1882) has it about right:
“Wit may be a thing of pure imagination, but humor involves sentiment and character. Humor is of a genial quality; it dwells in the same character with pathos, and is always mingled with sensibility.”
We are a cognitive society proud of our rationality but too often reveal our toxic side in our humor. We forget that humor is the test of our significance, and our significance of humor. It issues not in baldy laughter but in still smiles, and rises from deep within us in shared understanding of our common vulnerability.
Humor gives us a sense of proportion. It restores balance during the most trying of times and can provide an important coping mechanism with infirmities, ill health, and other evils of life that catch us when we are least prepared for them. Humor laughs with people, not at them. A smile makes life more bearable, a hearty laugh adds a certain fragrance to the joy. English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 – 1863) saw humor as our best article of dress in public.
It should come as no surprise that true humor springs from the heart not the head. It is not contempt for one’s situation or one’s enemies, but the essence of love. There is certainly no defense against adversity save the humor of putting life into perspective. We cannot all have large bank accounts, live in the best of neighborhoods, or dress in designer clothes, but we can be the best society has to offer with a sense of humor.
We live in a world of perpetual posturing, a world of constant conflict and blatant contradiction. Affectation has become a norm. Nothing is what it seems, and no one is who he pretends to be. We are constantly reminded of this as we see the movers and shakers of society fall from grace.
Life has been reduced to caricature. We are all exaggerated forms of this disguise. There is the social coercion to be something different than what we are. So, inexplicably, we wax highly dignified for the attention. Humor penetrates this façade and restores a certain authenticity. Spanish philosopher George Santayana (1863 – 1952) writes:
“A world of masks is superimposed on reality, and passes in every sphere of human interest for the reality itself. Humor is the perception of this illusion, whilst the convention continues to be maintained, as if we had not observed its absurdity.”
With change constantly threatening to overwhelm us, we resort to all manner of checks and balances to give the impression we are in control when clearly we are not. This makes us stick figures on stage of a humorless production, and we would be well to realize it. The more we attempt to cover up the absurdity of our existence the more we fall prey to reinforcing it. The conventional world has been reduced to masks superimposed on reality. It is humor that penetrates this absurdity to provide us with a perception of the illusion.
Irish playwright Samuel Beckett (1906 – 1989) filled our emptiness with the comedy of the absurd. In “Waiting for Godot” (1956), Estragon and Vladimir, two music-hall-clown-like protagonists, claim there is “Nothing to be done” to change their plight. They haven’t abandon hope, however, as they wait for the always-deferred arrival of the mysterious Godot.
These two characters have an unfailing commitment to actionless action, but we cannot help but recognize how we share the same absurdity. We are constantly looking past the present to some nebulous future as a panacea. Some of us yearn for a new job, a perfect mate, a winning lottery ticket, or a savior in a political leader to turn our crumbling world around.
Meanwhile, we remain passive, reactive and miserable waiting for Godot, the embodiment of Hope to rescue us. Beckett’s point, and this is the healthiness of his humor, is to remind us all that we are trapped in the pathos and pointlessness of the waiting game as much as Vladimir and Estragon.
Alas, there is not much authentic humor; there is not much uninhibited joy; there is not much radiant patience; there is not much spirited camaraderie; there is not much mutual understanding; there is not much uncompetitive collegiality; there is not much level-headed reasoning; there is not much original scholarship; there is not much daring creativity; and there is little evidence of naked enthusiasm for the “god within,” which is humor’s complement.
A sense of humor entertains the sublime and ridiculous as they dance merrily together while being equally fathomed without stepping on each other’s toes or losing perspective. It is the acceptance of contradiction that allows one to function efficiently. The sublime and the ridiculous are the extreme coordinates of the rational that gives measure to humor to see things as they are, not as they are supposed to be.
There is no point in purging our soul of our biases. They are as much a part of our chemistry as every other aspect. Biases constitute our fragile filtering system of early conditioning, and then are refined by our culture. Acknowledged and accepted with humor, they are no longer impossible barriers to seeing the world as it is. Our biases remind us that a flea accidentally landing on an elephant would view the whole animal in that narrow perspective. We are not too far removed from fleas in that respect.
* * * * * *
Monday, February 16, 2009
LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO YOURSELF!
LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO YOURSELF!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 16, 2009
“Man knows himself only inasmuch as he knows the world. He knows the world only within himself, and he is aware of himself only within the world. Each new object, truly recognized, opens up a new organ within ourselves.”
Goethe (1749 – 1832), German poet, dramatist, scientist and court official.
* * * * * *
REFERENCE: This is an excerpt from CONFIDENT THINKING.
* * * * * *
Many of us have little idea we have special talent, and need someone to point this out to us. One time I was in Denver giving a seminar, and my cousin, an electrical engineer attached to the Atomic Energy Commission, invited me to a party of his friends. They were all talking about an individual absent from the group who apparently had astonishing skills in quantum mechanics, but did nothing exceptional with his talent.
Episode after episode was related about his astounding work in the laboratory, and yet to a person, they thought he undervalued and underutilized his special genius. “There is no question in my mind,” said one, “if he focused on this discipline he would come up with a Nobel Prize making project.” The heads all nodded in agreement.
During the discussion, as I was an outsider and not privy either to the man or the complexities of the discussion, I had remained silent, and so it was a bit of a shock when I said, “It will never happen.” They all turned to look at me suspiciously, me the intruder disturbing their veneration of a colleague. Then I smiled, “Until someone tells him he is special, and introduces him to himself.”
They looked to my cousin, as if to say, who is this guy? Undismayed, I continued, “For most of us, we need someone to point out our essence. Otherwise, it is taken for granted as if common to everyone. It isn’t.”
They all seem to take this in with some degree of cynicism. “I wonder,” I said finally, “has anyone here ever had a candid discussion like this with him?” No one had. “Well, there’s the problem. We don’t gain personal insight by osmosis.”
Years later, I asked my cousin if anyone had ever taken up my challenge. “I did,” he said, “and he was stunned.” Did he do anything with it? “Well, he didn’t win the Nobel Prize, but he did become head of our department, and then went into intelligence work for the government.”
THE WISDOM OF AN OPEN ENDED PLAN
There is a young Major League baseball player by the name of Scott Kazmir currently playing for the Tampa Bay Rays in the American League. When he was a boy of nine-years-old trying out for the Little League team, the coach was hitting ground balls to each player at shortstop. When the ball was hit to Scott, it went through his legs and rolled all the way to the center field fence. He ran out and picked it up and threw a strike to first base. The throw traveled more than 200 feet on a straight line.
This was no small achievement for a boy so young. His coach told him that few boys have such a good arm. “I’m going to make you a pitcher,” he declared, and did.
Up to that point, Scott had no idea his arm was special. He is now pitching in the big leagues. In 2006, he was a member of the American League All-Star Team, having won ten games in the first half of the season. Only ten other pitchers so young in the more than hundred year history of Major League Baseball have won so many games.
So, this scrawny little kid, Scott Kazmir, whose talent was first noted as a boy, was molded into a pitcher and made it into the big leagues. The second half of the 2006 season did not go so well. Most of his time was spent on injured reserve winning only one more game. Surgery on his arm in the off-season placed his future in jeopardy, but he came back and helped the Tampa Bay Rays make it to the 2008 World Series, where they lost to the Philadelphia Phillies. What Scott Kazmir has achieved is rare as few aspiring athletes ever make it to major leagues at all.
When I was a boy, I played baseball on the courthouse lawn. This was located between the jail and courthouse, which sheriff Ky Petersen had converted into a playground for neighborhood kids. There I saw Dick Tharp demonstrate an arm not unlike Scott Kazmir’s. Only it was Dick’s misfortune to be a kid during World War II, when there was no Little League, and no organized baseball for a nine-year-old to profile his talent.
Dick Tharp in fact at age ten could throw a baseball 300 feet on a line, which many of us watched repeatedly in awe. One time, when he was eleven, he even threw the baseball from home plate at Riverview Stadium hitting the scoreboard on the fly 390 feet away. No major league scout was in Clinton, Iowa to see that, only the Courthouse Tigers, a neighborhood team, playing against other neighborhoods in the city recreational league.
Dick turned out to be a good pitcher but without guidance, mentoring, or anyone promoting his talent. It was never developed that it could become the basis of a career. Instead, he became a cross-country truck driver and that became his life’s work.
A moment of déjà vu was experienced when I attended his fiftieth wedding anniversary outside Orlando, Florida. I hadn’t seen Dick since we were kids. It was a country home with a large open field behind the house with a pasture of grazing horses. After dinner, I mentioned to his wife, whom I had never met before, what a great arm her husband had as a boy, only to have his thirty-three-year-old son interrupt, “I’ve got a better arm than my dad, don’t I, dad?”
Dick smiled, and said nothing. His son, a devil-may-care kind of guy, a smoker and drinker, and still didn’t like the idea being nailed down to anything permanent. In fact, he looked a bit wasted, which led me to say. “I don’t think so.”
“Want me to prove it?” he asked. Dick’s son picked up a new baseball with his left hand; Dick having been right handed, took the cigarette out of his mouth, rolled up his left sleeve, and said, “What do you want me to hit?”
The red wooden fence at the edge of the pasture was at least 300 feet away. I said dismissively, “Hit the fence.”
Undaunted, ignoring my sarcasm, he said, “Where do you want me to hit it?”
I couldn’t help myself; I roared with laughter, “Where do I want you to hit it? Anywhere, okay?” I thought at this point he was putting me on. Sensing this, he said, “I’m serious. Where do you want me to hit it?”
Well, there was a red post that joined the two sections of the fence together with a diameter of about ten inches. “Hit that red post!” I laughed again. It was obvious that he now felt the challenge.
“Where do you want me to hit it, high, low, or in the center?”
“Come on now, this has been fun enough, I said, “You don’t have to hit it at all. I apologize for egging you on.”
I was ready to go back into the house when he said; “I’m going to hit it about in the middle if that is okay by you?” And he did. On the fly. It was simply beautiful to watch. That white baseball flying through the air as if it had eyes, and a jet propulsion motor and an electronic guiding system. What a waste!
It was as if I was back at the courthouse many years before and Dick Tharp, with that beautiful arm, was displaying his talent. I got tears in my eyes. I don’t know why. I don’t know if it was nostalgia, disappointment, or what, but seeing one great talent wasted, and another wasting before my eyes. It was too much. Father and son were gifted by genetics but not visited by providence.
Scott Kazmir received a $2 million signing bonus when he turned professional. Dick’s son has never pitched professionally. He confesses he wasn’t interested, but I suspect he didn’t want to submit to the discipline, or possibility of not measuring up. His arm was simply something to show off to people such as me who might wonder, what if.
Athleticism is one talent. There are many others. Musical talent. Talent to write. To paint. To draw. To acquire foreign languages. To excel in mathematics and science. To think conceptually. To function well in a social environment. To handle pressure.
Talent demands discipline, organization, and drive to bring out its latency, and then the dedication to perfect that talent into something useful to others. It means taking the inevitable disappointments and failures in stride. They can’t be avoided. That said some stop when they hit a disappointment or experience a failure, and stay stuck there the rest of their lives. They allow a single misfortune to derail their efforts because their plan is one-dimensional, but life is multidimensional. Imagine how boring life would be if there was no struggle. Struggle is key to everything without exception. There is not a single person who achieves conspicuous success that is not ambitious, not driven, and does not make serious sacrifices toward that ambition.
MENTORING YOUR WAY TO FULFILLMENT
Some of us have minders who put us back on track when we derail. These mentors recognize special talent and know what is best for us. They are not in competition with us. I once had a boss, the late Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth, a wonderful mentor and the first man whoever got me to behave. He claimed he always hired people smarter than he was, which of course was ludicrous. He saw himself as a catalyst to developing people, which he was.
He was one of many mentors it has been my good fortune to have. He assessed what I could and would do. That was his “coaching style.” He estimated how far I could go, and created a climate for that possibility developing benchmarks to measure my competency. That was his “leadership style.” He alerted the corporate directors of these competencies and my readiness for a more challenging assignment. That was his “management style.” He set up a career track and monitored my progress. That was his “educator style.”
That doesn’t mean I always heeded his advice. In fact, I’ve been called a difficult person to manage. Someone once asked me why Dr. Pesuth was the exception. I answered simply, “I love the guy.” I discovered that love is a great motivator with me, and the love was derived from his being consistently firm, fair, honest, and in my face if he had a problem with me. He was passionately loyal to the company and his management, but also displayed the same passion and loyalty outside of work to family, friends and his religious faith.
* * * * * *
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Iowa, taking a required course in “Modern Literature, Greeks, and the Bible,” my professor Dr. Armens had me take an oral instead of a written make-up examination after being released from the university’s infirmary where I had been confined with infectious mononucleosis. It was at the end of the term and I sensed he didn’t want to grade another paper. My essays tended to be voluminous. Previously, I had written a paper on “The Influence of Religion in My Life,” which was long and complex and I think this factored in to his decision.
The examination was on James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” It started routinely with my professor asking me a few general questions about the work, which I answered, but then I stopped him suddenly. “Would it be possible to tell you what the book meant to me and how I read it in light of my own experience?”
Smoking a cigarette, behind a veil of spiraling mist, I couldn’t quite make out his face. I thought I heard a sigh, and then, “Go on.” So, I did.
For the next forty-five minutes I weaved the story of Joyce’s artist, Stephen Dedalus, the obvious alter ego of the author, and his war with Irish Catholicism, priests, his family, his youth, and the fury of his tormented soul, which resonated with me. I had not only read the book, but also devoured it, sensing I was experiencing an epiphany. “I was not the first to be so angry at my religion nor yet so consumed by it!”
Here I was, a lad, who had come from a small Iowa town with no books on literature in my home, who had never heard of James Joyce (although later I learned my mother had read him), but could see in the book a sympathetic soul parallel to my own.
It astounded me that words in a novel could speak so profoundly to what troubled me; that someone could describe what I thought had no language but gnawed at my conscience every day. I was ashamed of my impurity of thoughts; amazed that someone could be so honest and forthwith about such things, and yes, so gifted, to speak to my most private self. My face burned with passion as I concluded my remarks and looked to the professor.
For a long moment, the room was silent. Then the professor asked, “What is your major?” I said that I was a chemistry major. He replied, “What are you doing in science?” I said, “I’m good at it.” He said flatly, “You should be in the humanities, not science.” Then he added, “I didn’t have you read your paper on religion to the class, first because it was too long, but more importantly, too personal, too honest, too sincere. Many of these students are already jaded and would have laughed at your innocence. Joyce had that, too, and turned it into art. That could one day be you.”
He wanted to recommend me for the Honor’s Program, where I would pursue literature and possibly go on to become a writer.
When I broached the subject to my railroad brakeman da, he was incensed, claiming such people road his trains: “Reading books, long hair, dirty, unkempt, hanging on each other.” Then he exploded my idealistic trance with this question, “Jimmy, you’re not a goddamn fag are you?” It didn’t matter that I wasn’t. It was clear he would be ashamed of me if I left science for the arts. I didn’t. I became a chemist.
The professor’s recognized my essence, which I denied, but I did become a reader of books to which I have been loyal all my life.
Writers who have influenced Western thought have been my constant companions. It has also made me a devout student of culture and its impact on behavior. You could say it was a combination of my reading and my international career that found me abruptly retiring, the first time, in my thirties to assess where I was and where I was going.
I wrote some, but after a two-year sabbatical returned to the university to earn my doctorate in industrial and organizational psychology. Armed with this training, I returned to industry again, retiring a second time in my fifties to once more pursue the field my good professor suggested so many years before, writing. I share this with you because it is never too late to reacquaint oneself with oneself, and allow that self to bloom to fulfillment.
As long as the mind is alive and the body healthy, and soul not ignored, it is possible to do what you have always postponed doing. The time is right, right now!
COUNTERINTUITIVE WISDOM, THE MIND’S PLAN SET FREE
There are many factors that go into a life’s plan. Often they are composed of ideas we believe we should do with little room for variance. It is counterintuitive to think that the best plan is a plan that has no rigid components, a plan that breathes and allows essence to rise and fall to the rhythm of the occasion when it is ready, and not before.
What if there is no one to remind us of our essence? I think that is rare. More common is that we don’t want to listen. We have our mind made up and that is all there is to it. We see the road we have in mind as the safe road, the road most traveled, and that is to be our road, talent be damned!
In my day, the safest road of all was to become a doctor of medicine. That was a guaranteed income, prestige of the community as a healer, and a recognized person of substance, intellect, compassion, and caring.
MDs have come in for a great deal of heat in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, many are leaving the profession because of the exorbitant malpractice insurance costs. It was once a male-dominated profession, but now more women than men are in medical schools across the land. In a word, medicine has become an uncertain future.
The best and the brightest, graduates of our prestige universities, armed with MBA’s, a vision of money with its implicit power, have gone to Wall Street in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, only to have a severe economic meltdown in 2008 forcing panic retreat from that profession into cynicism. Economists have become the witch doctors of the postmodern world where the dinosaurs of greed have eclipsed the certainty of their sacred algorithms.
Men like certainty. Western man is guided primarily by his left-brain: logical, analytical, rational, sequential, and digital thinking. In this electronic age, man is a walking computer and slave to its matrixes. And like a computer, much of what is going on can be missed, driving the good doctors into malpractice suits, and others with the most sophisticated of educations into aberrant behavior. With lopsided minds, men often end up where they least expect to find themselves, weighed down by one side of their brain.
Women, on the other hand, while being left-brain efficient, are equally comfortable being right brain thinkers: holistic, intuitive, conceptual, non sequential, spatial, and analogical. Medicine, like many other professions, requires the bicameral mind using both hemispheres of the brain to give balance, humor, and proportion to thinking. Instead, often the two sides of the brain are at war with each other.
We are moving from “Machine Age” thinking where there is a place for everything and everything in its place to the world of general chaos. Where you are today doing what you are doing may in one sense have little to do with what you will be doing tomorrow, but in another sense be the reason you are doing it.
Psychologist B. F. Skinner was first into music; Albert Schweitzer was first an organist, then a theologian, then a medical missionary, and finally a philosopher. There is a musicality to Skinner’s behavioral theories, as there is meter and morality to Schweitzer’s philosophy.
Nothing we learn at any level is lost or discarded but is integrated into the new pattern of our life and thinking as we venture forward away from our initial experience and base.
Chemists and engineers who eventually become psychologists manage to build their earlier disciplines into their theories, such as David McClelland’s theory of “expectancy valence motivation.” Valence is the charge on an atomic electron, which dictates its activity. Expectancy valence is the theory that little successes lead to the expectation of greater success. This encourages us to mount greater challenges. Expectations have appreciated. In chemistry, the higher the valence the greater the electron activity.
Counterintuitive thinking suggests there is an unrevealed plan inside everyone’s mind that is waiting to be unfolded. It is a plan of many roads and many junctions, and even with a timetable as to when best to take one or another road, while making it clear that you can always double back if you should choose.
This life map has four-way stops and two-way roads going in all directions with suggested signs but only suggested signs for the traveler. The signs indicate the possibilities ahead, which might be read intuitively or counter intuitively, that is, taking a given road may not be consistent with logic, good sense, or pragmatic considerations, but it may be the best road for you.
* * * * * *
Such was the case when I retired the first time, after completing an assignment in South Africa. Life made no sense to me. I was making a good living but I was not happy with what I was, where I was, or with what I had experienced as it clashed with my beliefs and values. It was the era of apartheid in South Africa. I could not ignore it and simply do my job, and let it go at that. Something in me would not allow that.
Logic told me that I was too young to retire in my thirties, making too much money, had too many responsibilities, and should appreciate my success, and deal with it as an adult.
Logic further reminded me I had a wife and four small children to support and no inherited wealth to carry me in a pinch. In fact, my extended family was openly hostile to the idea that I retire; yet I did it. I took a two-year “time out,” and then backtracked on a road I had already taken, going back to school full-time, year around for six years, treating the pursuit of a doctorate in psychology as my therapy while consulting on the side. I also wrote and had my first book published, “Confident Selling” (1970).
It has all worked out well for me but the road ahead would be bumpy with many potholes, washed out bridges, and sometimes roads completely blocked off or closed. In the world of counterintuitive wisdom the mind is free and may sometimes find itself in surprising territory.
After a second executive career as a corporate executive with Honeywell Europe, where I witnessed Europe’s struggle to become an integrated economic community, I retired again in the early 1990s to write about such struggles in the postmodern world of business:
n Between managers and the emerging professional class.
n Between old Europe being reborn as the European Economic Community.
My writing gained international exposure and I was riding high. Here I was writing about the death of corpocracy or top-down management and the emergence of knowledge power to replace position power; and the death old fragmented Europe being reborn as a new integrated community, when one day the idea of my own mortality kicked in.
That was the case when a dear friend died young, Bobby Witt, setting my mind to remembering those halcyon Courthouse Tiger days, finding me eventually writing a memoir as a novel, “In the Shadow of the Courthouse; Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel” (2003).
Were it not for taking that road less traveled, that book would never have been written. The book is now the frozen music of a time, which cannot be changed even though there is no longer a courthouse lawn. A large public safety building has been constructed in its place. Nor are there any longer a St. Patrick’s Grammar School, Church and Rectory, which is pivotal to the courthouse story. The Bishop of the Davenport Diocese of Iowa has erased this complex from the community.
If I never write another book, I am glad this book was written. It is a snapshot of a period (1941 – 1947) when we all came of age in the shadow of the courthouse while the United States struggled to come of age in the shadow of the atomic bomb.
BEST LAID PLANS SOON GO AWRY OR THE POWER OF SURENDIPITY
Planning in terms of Confident Thinking is a learning process in constant motion, a journey not an end, a surprise filled series of happenstances with a faithful commitment to the effective utilization of one’s inherent ability in the service of others. The reason for this is that our essence is not usually revealed as a whole. Obstacles are invariably encountered that test our resolve and hide our authentic self from us. So, in planning your work and working your plan, remember you are in the learning business from the beginning to the very end of your life.
Goethe seems to have had this in mind in “Faust” (1790) when he gave expression to the concept of the “ever striving man”:
“Neither knowledge nor power nor sex can give an ultimately satisfactory answer to the question which man is asked by the fact of his very existence. Only the free and productive man, united to his fellow man, can give the right answer to man’s existence.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 16, 2009
“Man knows himself only inasmuch as he knows the world. He knows the world only within himself, and he is aware of himself only within the world. Each new object, truly recognized, opens up a new organ within ourselves.”
Goethe (1749 – 1832), German poet, dramatist, scientist and court official.
* * * * * *
REFERENCE: This is an excerpt from CONFIDENT THINKING.
* * * * * *
Many of us have little idea we have special talent, and need someone to point this out to us. One time I was in Denver giving a seminar, and my cousin, an electrical engineer attached to the Atomic Energy Commission, invited me to a party of his friends. They were all talking about an individual absent from the group who apparently had astonishing skills in quantum mechanics, but did nothing exceptional with his talent.
Episode after episode was related about his astounding work in the laboratory, and yet to a person, they thought he undervalued and underutilized his special genius. “There is no question in my mind,” said one, “if he focused on this discipline he would come up with a Nobel Prize making project.” The heads all nodded in agreement.
During the discussion, as I was an outsider and not privy either to the man or the complexities of the discussion, I had remained silent, and so it was a bit of a shock when I said, “It will never happen.” They all turned to look at me suspiciously, me the intruder disturbing their veneration of a colleague. Then I smiled, “Until someone tells him he is special, and introduces him to himself.”
They looked to my cousin, as if to say, who is this guy? Undismayed, I continued, “For most of us, we need someone to point out our essence. Otherwise, it is taken for granted as if common to everyone. It isn’t.”
They all seem to take this in with some degree of cynicism. “I wonder,” I said finally, “has anyone here ever had a candid discussion like this with him?” No one had. “Well, there’s the problem. We don’t gain personal insight by osmosis.”
Years later, I asked my cousin if anyone had ever taken up my challenge. “I did,” he said, “and he was stunned.” Did he do anything with it? “Well, he didn’t win the Nobel Prize, but he did become head of our department, and then went into intelligence work for the government.”
THE WISDOM OF AN OPEN ENDED PLAN
There is a young Major League baseball player by the name of Scott Kazmir currently playing for the Tampa Bay Rays in the American League. When he was a boy of nine-years-old trying out for the Little League team, the coach was hitting ground balls to each player at shortstop. When the ball was hit to Scott, it went through his legs and rolled all the way to the center field fence. He ran out and picked it up and threw a strike to first base. The throw traveled more than 200 feet on a straight line.
This was no small achievement for a boy so young. His coach told him that few boys have such a good arm. “I’m going to make you a pitcher,” he declared, and did.
Up to that point, Scott had no idea his arm was special. He is now pitching in the big leagues. In 2006, he was a member of the American League All-Star Team, having won ten games in the first half of the season. Only ten other pitchers so young in the more than hundred year history of Major League Baseball have won so many games.
So, this scrawny little kid, Scott Kazmir, whose talent was first noted as a boy, was molded into a pitcher and made it into the big leagues. The second half of the 2006 season did not go so well. Most of his time was spent on injured reserve winning only one more game. Surgery on his arm in the off-season placed his future in jeopardy, but he came back and helped the Tampa Bay Rays make it to the 2008 World Series, where they lost to the Philadelphia Phillies. What Scott Kazmir has achieved is rare as few aspiring athletes ever make it to major leagues at all.
When I was a boy, I played baseball on the courthouse lawn. This was located between the jail and courthouse, which sheriff Ky Petersen had converted into a playground for neighborhood kids. There I saw Dick Tharp demonstrate an arm not unlike Scott Kazmir’s. Only it was Dick’s misfortune to be a kid during World War II, when there was no Little League, and no organized baseball for a nine-year-old to profile his talent.
Dick Tharp in fact at age ten could throw a baseball 300 feet on a line, which many of us watched repeatedly in awe. One time, when he was eleven, he even threw the baseball from home plate at Riverview Stadium hitting the scoreboard on the fly 390 feet away. No major league scout was in Clinton, Iowa to see that, only the Courthouse Tigers, a neighborhood team, playing against other neighborhoods in the city recreational league.
Dick turned out to be a good pitcher but without guidance, mentoring, or anyone promoting his talent. It was never developed that it could become the basis of a career. Instead, he became a cross-country truck driver and that became his life’s work.
A moment of déjà vu was experienced when I attended his fiftieth wedding anniversary outside Orlando, Florida. I hadn’t seen Dick since we were kids. It was a country home with a large open field behind the house with a pasture of grazing horses. After dinner, I mentioned to his wife, whom I had never met before, what a great arm her husband had as a boy, only to have his thirty-three-year-old son interrupt, “I’ve got a better arm than my dad, don’t I, dad?”
Dick smiled, and said nothing. His son, a devil-may-care kind of guy, a smoker and drinker, and still didn’t like the idea being nailed down to anything permanent. In fact, he looked a bit wasted, which led me to say. “I don’t think so.”
“Want me to prove it?” he asked. Dick’s son picked up a new baseball with his left hand; Dick having been right handed, took the cigarette out of his mouth, rolled up his left sleeve, and said, “What do you want me to hit?”
The red wooden fence at the edge of the pasture was at least 300 feet away. I said dismissively, “Hit the fence.”
Undaunted, ignoring my sarcasm, he said, “Where do you want me to hit it?”
I couldn’t help myself; I roared with laughter, “Where do I want you to hit it? Anywhere, okay?” I thought at this point he was putting me on. Sensing this, he said, “I’m serious. Where do you want me to hit it?”
Well, there was a red post that joined the two sections of the fence together with a diameter of about ten inches. “Hit that red post!” I laughed again. It was obvious that he now felt the challenge.
“Where do you want me to hit it, high, low, or in the center?”
“Come on now, this has been fun enough, I said, “You don’t have to hit it at all. I apologize for egging you on.”
I was ready to go back into the house when he said; “I’m going to hit it about in the middle if that is okay by you?” And he did. On the fly. It was simply beautiful to watch. That white baseball flying through the air as if it had eyes, and a jet propulsion motor and an electronic guiding system. What a waste!
It was as if I was back at the courthouse many years before and Dick Tharp, with that beautiful arm, was displaying his talent. I got tears in my eyes. I don’t know why. I don’t know if it was nostalgia, disappointment, or what, but seeing one great talent wasted, and another wasting before my eyes. It was too much. Father and son were gifted by genetics but not visited by providence.
Scott Kazmir received a $2 million signing bonus when he turned professional. Dick’s son has never pitched professionally. He confesses he wasn’t interested, but I suspect he didn’t want to submit to the discipline, or possibility of not measuring up. His arm was simply something to show off to people such as me who might wonder, what if.
Athleticism is one talent. There are many others. Musical talent. Talent to write. To paint. To draw. To acquire foreign languages. To excel in mathematics and science. To think conceptually. To function well in a social environment. To handle pressure.
Talent demands discipline, organization, and drive to bring out its latency, and then the dedication to perfect that talent into something useful to others. It means taking the inevitable disappointments and failures in stride. They can’t be avoided. That said some stop when they hit a disappointment or experience a failure, and stay stuck there the rest of their lives. They allow a single misfortune to derail their efforts because their plan is one-dimensional, but life is multidimensional. Imagine how boring life would be if there was no struggle. Struggle is key to everything without exception. There is not a single person who achieves conspicuous success that is not ambitious, not driven, and does not make serious sacrifices toward that ambition.
MENTORING YOUR WAY TO FULFILLMENT
Some of us have minders who put us back on track when we derail. These mentors recognize special talent and know what is best for us. They are not in competition with us. I once had a boss, the late Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth, a wonderful mentor and the first man whoever got me to behave. He claimed he always hired people smarter than he was, which of course was ludicrous. He saw himself as a catalyst to developing people, which he was.
He was one of many mentors it has been my good fortune to have. He assessed what I could and would do. That was his “coaching style.” He estimated how far I could go, and created a climate for that possibility developing benchmarks to measure my competency. That was his “leadership style.” He alerted the corporate directors of these competencies and my readiness for a more challenging assignment. That was his “management style.” He set up a career track and monitored my progress. That was his “educator style.”
That doesn’t mean I always heeded his advice. In fact, I’ve been called a difficult person to manage. Someone once asked me why Dr. Pesuth was the exception. I answered simply, “I love the guy.” I discovered that love is a great motivator with me, and the love was derived from his being consistently firm, fair, honest, and in my face if he had a problem with me. He was passionately loyal to the company and his management, but also displayed the same passion and loyalty outside of work to family, friends and his religious faith.
* * * * * *
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Iowa, taking a required course in “Modern Literature, Greeks, and the Bible,” my professor Dr. Armens had me take an oral instead of a written make-up examination after being released from the university’s infirmary where I had been confined with infectious mononucleosis. It was at the end of the term and I sensed he didn’t want to grade another paper. My essays tended to be voluminous. Previously, I had written a paper on “The Influence of Religion in My Life,” which was long and complex and I think this factored in to his decision.
The examination was on James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” It started routinely with my professor asking me a few general questions about the work, which I answered, but then I stopped him suddenly. “Would it be possible to tell you what the book meant to me and how I read it in light of my own experience?”
Smoking a cigarette, behind a veil of spiraling mist, I couldn’t quite make out his face. I thought I heard a sigh, and then, “Go on.” So, I did.
For the next forty-five minutes I weaved the story of Joyce’s artist, Stephen Dedalus, the obvious alter ego of the author, and his war with Irish Catholicism, priests, his family, his youth, and the fury of his tormented soul, which resonated with me. I had not only read the book, but also devoured it, sensing I was experiencing an epiphany. “I was not the first to be so angry at my religion nor yet so consumed by it!”
Here I was, a lad, who had come from a small Iowa town with no books on literature in my home, who had never heard of James Joyce (although later I learned my mother had read him), but could see in the book a sympathetic soul parallel to my own.
It astounded me that words in a novel could speak so profoundly to what troubled me; that someone could describe what I thought had no language but gnawed at my conscience every day. I was ashamed of my impurity of thoughts; amazed that someone could be so honest and forthwith about such things, and yes, so gifted, to speak to my most private self. My face burned with passion as I concluded my remarks and looked to the professor.
For a long moment, the room was silent. Then the professor asked, “What is your major?” I said that I was a chemistry major. He replied, “What are you doing in science?” I said, “I’m good at it.” He said flatly, “You should be in the humanities, not science.” Then he added, “I didn’t have you read your paper on religion to the class, first because it was too long, but more importantly, too personal, too honest, too sincere. Many of these students are already jaded and would have laughed at your innocence. Joyce had that, too, and turned it into art. That could one day be you.”
He wanted to recommend me for the Honor’s Program, where I would pursue literature and possibly go on to become a writer.
When I broached the subject to my railroad brakeman da, he was incensed, claiming such people road his trains: “Reading books, long hair, dirty, unkempt, hanging on each other.” Then he exploded my idealistic trance with this question, “Jimmy, you’re not a goddamn fag are you?” It didn’t matter that I wasn’t. It was clear he would be ashamed of me if I left science for the arts. I didn’t. I became a chemist.
The professor’s recognized my essence, which I denied, but I did become a reader of books to which I have been loyal all my life.
Writers who have influenced Western thought have been my constant companions. It has also made me a devout student of culture and its impact on behavior. You could say it was a combination of my reading and my international career that found me abruptly retiring, the first time, in my thirties to assess where I was and where I was going.
I wrote some, but after a two-year sabbatical returned to the university to earn my doctorate in industrial and organizational psychology. Armed with this training, I returned to industry again, retiring a second time in my fifties to once more pursue the field my good professor suggested so many years before, writing. I share this with you because it is never too late to reacquaint oneself with oneself, and allow that self to bloom to fulfillment.
As long as the mind is alive and the body healthy, and soul not ignored, it is possible to do what you have always postponed doing. The time is right, right now!
COUNTERINTUITIVE WISDOM, THE MIND’S PLAN SET FREE
There are many factors that go into a life’s plan. Often they are composed of ideas we believe we should do with little room for variance. It is counterintuitive to think that the best plan is a plan that has no rigid components, a plan that breathes and allows essence to rise and fall to the rhythm of the occasion when it is ready, and not before.
What if there is no one to remind us of our essence? I think that is rare. More common is that we don’t want to listen. We have our mind made up and that is all there is to it. We see the road we have in mind as the safe road, the road most traveled, and that is to be our road, talent be damned!
In my day, the safest road of all was to become a doctor of medicine. That was a guaranteed income, prestige of the community as a healer, and a recognized person of substance, intellect, compassion, and caring.
MDs have come in for a great deal of heat in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, many are leaving the profession because of the exorbitant malpractice insurance costs. It was once a male-dominated profession, but now more women than men are in medical schools across the land. In a word, medicine has become an uncertain future.
The best and the brightest, graduates of our prestige universities, armed with MBA’s, a vision of money with its implicit power, have gone to Wall Street in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, only to have a severe economic meltdown in 2008 forcing panic retreat from that profession into cynicism. Economists have become the witch doctors of the postmodern world where the dinosaurs of greed have eclipsed the certainty of their sacred algorithms.
Men like certainty. Western man is guided primarily by his left-brain: logical, analytical, rational, sequential, and digital thinking. In this electronic age, man is a walking computer and slave to its matrixes. And like a computer, much of what is going on can be missed, driving the good doctors into malpractice suits, and others with the most sophisticated of educations into aberrant behavior. With lopsided minds, men often end up where they least expect to find themselves, weighed down by one side of their brain.
Women, on the other hand, while being left-brain efficient, are equally comfortable being right brain thinkers: holistic, intuitive, conceptual, non sequential, spatial, and analogical. Medicine, like many other professions, requires the bicameral mind using both hemispheres of the brain to give balance, humor, and proportion to thinking. Instead, often the two sides of the brain are at war with each other.
We are moving from “Machine Age” thinking where there is a place for everything and everything in its place to the world of general chaos. Where you are today doing what you are doing may in one sense have little to do with what you will be doing tomorrow, but in another sense be the reason you are doing it.
Psychologist B. F. Skinner was first into music; Albert Schweitzer was first an organist, then a theologian, then a medical missionary, and finally a philosopher. There is a musicality to Skinner’s behavioral theories, as there is meter and morality to Schweitzer’s philosophy.
Nothing we learn at any level is lost or discarded but is integrated into the new pattern of our life and thinking as we venture forward away from our initial experience and base.
Chemists and engineers who eventually become psychologists manage to build their earlier disciplines into their theories, such as David McClelland’s theory of “expectancy valence motivation.” Valence is the charge on an atomic electron, which dictates its activity. Expectancy valence is the theory that little successes lead to the expectation of greater success. This encourages us to mount greater challenges. Expectations have appreciated. In chemistry, the higher the valence the greater the electron activity.
Counterintuitive thinking suggests there is an unrevealed plan inside everyone’s mind that is waiting to be unfolded. It is a plan of many roads and many junctions, and even with a timetable as to when best to take one or another road, while making it clear that you can always double back if you should choose.
This life map has four-way stops and two-way roads going in all directions with suggested signs but only suggested signs for the traveler. The signs indicate the possibilities ahead, which might be read intuitively or counter intuitively, that is, taking a given road may not be consistent with logic, good sense, or pragmatic considerations, but it may be the best road for you.
* * * * * *
Such was the case when I retired the first time, after completing an assignment in South Africa. Life made no sense to me. I was making a good living but I was not happy with what I was, where I was, or with what I had experienced as it clashed with my beliefs and values. It was the era of apartheid in South Africa. I could not ignore it and simply do my job, and let it go at that. Something in me would not allow that.
Logic told me that I was too young to retire in my thirties, making too much money, had too many responsibilities, and should appreciate my success, and deal with it as an adult.
Logic further reminded me I had a wife and four small children to support and no inherited wealth to carry me in a pinch. In fact, my extended family was openly hostile to the idea that I retire; yet I did it. I took a two-year “time out,” and then backtracked on a road I had already taken, going back to school full-time, year around for six years, treating the pursuit of a doctorate in psychology as my therapy while consulting on the side. I also wrote and had my first book published, “Confident Selling” (1970).
It has all worked out well for me but the road ahead would be bumpy with many potholes, washed out bridges, and sometimes roads completely blocked off or closed. In the world of counterintuitive wisdom the mind is free and may sometimes find itself in surprising territory.
After a second executive career as a corporate executive with Honeywell Europe, where I witnessed Europe’s struggle to become an integrated economic community, I retired again in the early 1990s to write about such struggles in the postmodern world of business:
n Between managers and the emerging professional class.
n Between old Europe being reborn as the European Economic Community.
My writing gained international exposure and I was riding high. Here I was writing about the death of corpocracy or top-down management and the emergence of knowledge power to replace position power; and the death old fragmented Europe being reborn as a new integrated community, when one day the idea of my own mortality kicked in.
That was the case when a dear friend died young, Bobby Witt, setting my mind to remembering those halcyon Courthouse Tiger days, finding me eventually writing a memoir as a novel, “In the Shadow of the Courthouse; Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel” (2003).
Were it not for taking that road less traveled, that book would never have been written. The book is now the frozen music of a time, which cannot be changed even though there is no longer a courthouse lawn. A large public safety building has been constructed in its place. Nor are there any longer a St. Patrick’s Grammar School, Church and Rectory, which is pivotal to the courthouse story. The Bishop of the Davenport Diocese of Iowa has erased this complex from the community.
If I never write another book, I am glad this book was written. It is a snapshot of a period (1941 – 1947) when we all came of age in the shadow of the courthouse while the United States struggled to come of age in the shadow of the atomic bomb.
BEST LAID PLANS SOON GO AWRY OR THE POWER OF SURENDIPITY
Planning in terms of Confident Thinking is a learning process in constant motion, a journey not an end, a surprise filled series of happenstances with a faithful commitment to the effective utilization of one’s inherent ability in the service of others. The reason for this is that our essence is not usually revealed as a whole. Obstacles are invariably encountered that test our resolve and hide our authentic self from us. So, in planning your work and working your plan, remember you are in the learning business from the beginning to the very end of your life.
Goethe seems to have had this in mind in “Faust” (1790) when he gave expression to the concept of the “ever striving man”:
“Neither knowledge nor power nor sex can give an ultimately satisfactory answer to the question which man is asked by the fact of his very existence. Only the free and productive man, united to his fellow man, can give the right answer to man’s existence.”