AUTHOR'S NOTE TO CONFIDENT THINKING

Author’s Note to Confident Thinking

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 6, 2009

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882), American poet and essayist

“Unhappy he, who from the first of joys – society – cut off, is left alone, amid this world of death.”

James Thomson, 18th Century Scottish poet

REFERENCE: This excerpt is from Dr. Fisher's new book.

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Confident Thinking is a guide to busy people who feel pulled away from their pragmatic center by the distractions and perturbations of a world in the process of redefining itself.

The economy has collapsed, as hundred-year-old companies are in bankruptcy, threatened with bankruptcy or have disappeared entirely. Stocks on Wall Street, which once sold for anywhere from $50 to $200 per share are now selling for $1 or less. Housing prices are falling precipitously. Consumer confidence has plummeted. As this is being written, one in eight homeowners is at least a month behind in their mortgage payments.

American society, once known for its insouciant waste making, is tightening its economic belt, and unapologetically, many for the first time, shopping at discount stores and buying clothes in consignment shops, and these are people earning more than $100,000 per year.

We are in unchartered territory, as the world “out there” moves ever closer to us “in here.” We are in every sense a global village, and it is admittedly frightening to our natural isolationism and xenophobia. The United States likes being called the “melting pot” of nations as long as everyone speaks English, adopts the American culture, and keeps to its own kind. But that, too, has all changed. There is little comfort now in the old myths and stereotypes which once clothed our psyches. We are in a New Age.

We have talking heads on radio and television spieling out nonsense, a sitting president using the bully pulpit as if an extension of his personality, an economic Nobel Laureate gee whizzing us to death, a bearded Federal Reserve Chairman playing the Oracle of Delphi off key, and a sputtering stuttering shuddering Congress trying to reassure us, when none of these voices have left twentieth century critical thinking despite all their electronic handheld devices and reassurances to the contrary. We are in a New Age, which places new demands on us, but our atavistic leadership keeps us stuck in another time.

People, we are on our own. We cannot depend on our leaders to think for us, to provide for us, to protect us from ourselves, or reassure us that despite it all, everything will turn out okay in the end. It won’t if we’re not attentive, self-involved, self-directed, self-managed, and most important of all, self-committed to prevailing in this New Age.

Confident Thinking is written by a guy who never joined the crowd at any time in his life; never bought into the hype; never waited for someone else to dress his wounded psyche; never compared and competed, or attempted to keep up with the Jones, but lived an unobtrusive but somewhat hectic life. Confident Thinking is what he has learned from experience and people on how to function in an increasingly frustrating climate.

Confident Thinking is about thinking creatively, or beyond what is known, understood, and accepted as the “God’s honest truth.” It is about saying “goodbye” to the twentieth century’s reactive, conforming, conflict avoiding, polite, submissive and obedient society, which is killing our spirit by absolving us from the consequences of our actions.

Confident Thinking is about thinking confidently and creatively in work and in life by taking charge instead of waiting for the leadership to pull a miracle out of its hat. It didn’t happen in the Great Depression although President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was given such credit. WWII ended the Great Depression. .

For the past fifty years, we have witnessed the disintegration of leadership at every level in every institution while failures; scandals, malfeasance, gross neglect and incompetence have led to a world in crisis.

We all share responsibility in this collapse. We were trained to ignore the evidence of the decline – “It’s not our job!” Institutional leadership took our power and initiative from us as students, and bribed us with automatic promotion in school and allowed our asocial behavior to go unpunished. Commercial leadership took our power and initiative from us as workers, and bribed us with entitlements we didn’t earn and were unrelated to our actual performance.

Society systematically broke our spirit by parents acting as children, schools acting as playgrounds, places of worship as entertainment centers, and workplaces as recreational complexes. Meanwhile, government maintained a policy of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” until it was too late to fix anything. So, we have been complicit in finding ourselves morally, spiritually, physically and psychologically bankrupt in this New Age. The problem with this thinking, however, is that “we are society!”

We did it to ourselves. There is no profit in pointing fingers or resorting to the blame game. It is too late for that. We have no choice but to take charge and to think differently on purpose. The president can’t pull us out of this mess, neither can the CEO of the company for which we work, nor can we expect it of Congress. They all stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn’t face them, and now because of that, the future is left up for grabs.

We can no longer wait for them. I never have. A long time ago I recognized that every man is an island unto himself with an opportunity to make choices that either serve or enslave him. Subliminal stimuli constantly bombard our subconscious with “wants” which are masked as “needs” with the background mantra “progress is our most important product.” It is precisely that self-indulgent scenario that is killing our planet and with it our spirit to be in harmony with nature.

A fact of existence that we have ignored as long as we thought possible is this: each time a new tool is invented something is sacrificed for something gained. Little attention is paid to what is lost only to what is gained because what is gained seems so overwhelming.

This is what I call a “cut & control” phenomenon and a gauge of prosperity as a measure of wealth and power. It has spurred us on with the rationale of progress. Progress is a mindset, a condition to this day that is seldom questioned. Prosperity, which is the product of progress, has become society’s most important product. What is prosperity?

Prosperity is the societal condition of continuously thriving for more, of always pushing the envelope, never assessing limitations, seldom considering consequences. Economic well being is justified at the expense of what is cut and controlled. It is a psychological blindness, a phenomenological view that progress has paradise in mind (utopia) for everyone. This book challenges that belief and this thinking.

This is not a theoretical treatise but taken from lessons learned in a long and productive life. My life has been a happy one if not always an unproblematic one, which I sense is common to most readers.

These ten steps in Confident Thinking have been my best friends, often when I had no other. They provided me with the help I needed to rebound when it looked as if I was going down for the final count, and had no future. Walt Whitman, who left school at eleven, taught himself to write poetry, which became the “American style.” He was often heard to cry, “I am great.” It is an important part of his poem “Leaves of Grass,” which he wrote and rewrote from 1855, when it was first published to the year of his death in 1892, a total of at least eleven revisions.

Walt Whitman wasn’t expressing conceit, but the expansiveness of the American conscience as well as his own as its energy and light emblazoned the world. He believed in unlocking his greatness he would inspire others to do so as well, and thus radiate a new crescendo of universal greatness from sea to shinning sea.

The key to Confident Thinking is finding the rhythm of your own heart and mind working as one as if a lyrical poem. These ten steps are designed to help you in that pursuit to soar to new greatness. It is one of the ironies, as flow psychology has taught us, that it takes more energy to be stuck than to go with the flow.

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