IATROGENIC -- YET ANOTHER EXCHANGE! "ENAMORED OF WORDS" -- PART TWO

IATROGENIC – YET ANOTHER EXCHANGE!

“ENAMORED OF WORDS!” – PART TWO

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 25, 2009

“Words are both better and worse than thoughts; they express them, and add to them; they give them power for good or evil; they start them on an endless flight, for instruction and comfort and blessing, or for injury and sorrow and ruin.”

Tryon Edwards (1809 – 1894), American theologian and great grandson of Jonathan Edwards (1703 – 1758), American theologian

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS (Continued from Part One):

Combinations of words can be confusing, but also enriching with the pen of Russian born English philosopher Isaiah Berlin. I read with great relish his sentences, sometimes of 500 words, without getting lost in them. I only wish I were his equal with such clarity. That said it is his concepts that interest me in particular; for example, his take on “negative freedom” and “positive freedom.” I had never thought much about the complexity of freedom before reading him.

“Negative freedom” is freedom without barriers. “Positive freedom” is the freedom we enjoy in our Republic, which is loaded with barriers, and increasingly so since 9/11.

In our mind’s eye, we think of something that is “negative” as bad and something as “positive” as always good. Well, that is not necessarily so when it comes to freedom, or, indeed, for “entropy,” which we have discussed “negative entropy” earlier.

“Negative freedom” is something we are losing every day.

On WGN Chicago television today (March 26, 2009), the noon broadcast informed Chicago metropolitan and suburban viewers that not only are cameras to be placed at many stop signs in the city checking for motorists going through red lights, but monitors are also being installed to read license plates of speeders for prosecution as well.

The first reaction to this may be, “That is a good thing,” but it is yet another barrier to “negative freedom.”

The downside of such impositions is that it weakens our collective resolve to behave responsibly because it “is the right thing to do.” The need for such electronic controls makes us more dependent as if still children, or “not to be trusted to do the right thing” on our own.

Without self-trust, there is little chance to develop trustworthiness, or a moral center and functioning moral compass. If we cannot trust ourselves, we are opening the door for someone outside ourselves to assume that responsibility through external control.

My concern is that the abdication of self-responsibility is an invitation for “positive freedom” to accrue without so much as a by your leave.

The Swedish writer, Hakan Nesser introduced me to a new concept, “Klimze Razor.” It is the guidelines for civilized and intelligent conversation. Its basic principle is balance. You can’t demand any more of the person you’re talking to than you are prepared to give of yourself. Decision makers, persons in positions of power usually like to give the impression they are democratic and transparent. I’m sure the City Council of Chicago in imposing these restrictions was of the mind it was conducting a two-way conversation with voters assuming their agreement with such statues.

Corporate executives do the same with mysterious feelings of satisfaction when they organize redundancy exercises while passing out bonuses amongst themselves, saying as they let people go to not take it personally. “We are saving the company in the long run” is their mantra, implying they have an indispensable role and the company would tank without them, when it probably is tanking because of them.

Our corporate society, what I call corpocracy, represents an example of positive freedom, as we are a society of laws and not men. Justice is blind. Nearly every day new laws are passed in the Federal government, the State government, and the Municipal government that increase the leverage of positive freedom. This is also the case in the private corporation without the voices of those affected in the conversation. CEOs with mild, understanding demeanors and paternal tone of voices are daily dispatching people to the soup lines with the comment, “Somebody has to do it.”

Here in Florida we are in the third year of a drought and new laws are being imposed on people watering their lawns. We now have a water police patrol at taxpayers’ expense, but even more effective are neighbors turning in neighbors who don’t abide by the water restrictions, again a further example of positive freedom. We are told such behavior was common in WWII when Jews attempted to hide from the Nazis. Far more common today are people in the workforce turning each other in for minor transgressions, failing to see how they are shrinking their own and everyone else’s “negative freedom” by doing so.

“Positive freedom” can be a barrier to productivity. It is not simply the laws, rules and regulations, policies and procedures imposed by authority that are alone the culprit, but the invisible hand of innuendo and assumption that dictates how people are likely to behave. The more fear the more rules the more chaos the more rules. Fear and chaos are constructs of entropy, and indicative of a sick workplace.

Most workplace cultures I have experienced play off attributions of fear. As such, there is an incessant need of belonging, true believing, and collective security. You are not to embarrass your boss or your colleagues by having a conversation in which you demand as much attention as you interlocutor demands of you.

Since I have spent a good deal of my career on my own flying about the globe, I was essentially guided by “negative freedom.” That found me rising early and working late every day. As I have written elsewhere, when I was a young chemical sales engineer, I would make my service calls well into the night where allowed in plants operating on three shifts so that I could make more sales calls during the business day.

When I was reduced to having an office in a huge facility, and was expected to be there from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., I encountered immediate suspicion when I came in at 7 a.m. and left at 7 p.m. I was going against the consensus culture; I was making other people look bad; I was accused of drawing attention to myself; I was accused of having no personal life; I was accused of having a hidden agenda; I was finally ordered to cease and desist, which I did. Corpocracy had no room for “negative freedom.”

The workplace culture was committed to conformity, ritualism, and rites of passage and promotion with productive work an incidental if not accidental process with it neither being a sufficient or necessary condition to continuing employment.

Somewhat in good humor, I’ve been told I dress like I did sixty years ago, and I do. I’ve never leaped on the bandwagon of any trend at any time in my life. It has been my very narrow window of self-assertion in terms of “negative freedom.” Be assured that “positive freedom” signals go off if you don’t dress, walk, talk and conform to the lights of the culture.

One time three engineers came to me from research and development complaining about a colleague that wore the same shirt and pants every day for more than a month.

“Why does it bother you?” I asked. They looked at me as if I were mad. “Does he stink?” I added.

“No, it’s not that, it’s just not professional.”

“Professional” is another word with which I have trouble. Professionals, especially engineers in my experience, and I am one, disdain honest intellectual discussion outside their discipline, and are by nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent and often subversive. They organize their pride around their disciplines with narrow answers and rigid structures, and expect others outside their disciplines to accept their answers without a fairly well. In this case, I didn’t provoke them with my disdain. Instead, I suggested,

“Maybe he washes them out every night; maybe he has five outfits that are the same; maybe he considers this his uniform,” then I smiled, “maybe he is trying to tell you something.” I was thinking of “negative freedom.”

Totally flummox by then, they left wondering what kind of a psychologist I was.

Behaving to the letter of the established culture manifests a depersonalizing affect. You become a drone without distinction. Stepping outside the culture, ignoring it, or failing to bow to its demands takes personal fortitude. Exorbitant pressure to conform is almost a constant. You place yourself in some jeopardy if you don’t. Isaiah Berlin writes about how fascism and communism have used the machinations of “positive freedom” to impose their ideological will. American corporations practice positive freedom squared.

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Other terms I have used in my writing are “false positive” and “false negative.” These are tricky statistical terms primarily used in medicine, but have metaphorical appeal in explaining things other than statistical significance.

Say a medical test is accurate to 99 percent and the test finds you healthy, when you are not. Despite its impressive statistical history, the test is incorrect, and therefore a “false positive.” I have used the term to explain a situation when the evidence was overwhelmingly slanted in one direction, but totally wrong.

A “false positive” occurs when 99 percent of the times the outcome shows a specific result. If it doesn’t, and indicates just the opposite, then it is a “false positive paradox.” The Chicago Tribune declared Governor Thomas Dewey in 1948 the newly elected president. The newspaper was wrong. The polls had been misread; Harry S. Truman was the winner. A famous picture shows Truman holding up the Chicago newspaper’s front page declaring Dewey the winner with a picture of the New York governor. This was a “false positive.”

A test result that appears negative for a specific cancer and is considered 99 percent accurate yet that cancer does exist, but the test fails to show that it does. That is a “false negative.” I have used the term in one of my books where eight CEOs of cigarette companies, under oath, told Congress that laboratory studies of cigarettes showed that cigarette smoking wasn’t harmful to smokers’ health, yet the mounting death rates among cigarette smokers proved otherwise.

In one sense, such words as “false positive” and “false negative” have the ring of jargon, but in another sense, they remind us that what seems true isn’t always, and we have to be on our guard. Words kill, and often we are their victims.

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We all have the same thinking equipment yet we often are more influenced by the speaker or the source and not the words spoken, or how they register with us. We are inclined to trust ourselves last when that is all we have. An intelligent person is one who is not afraid to say I don’t know, or I don’t understand, and has the temerity to say, “Could you pass that by me again?” It is also the person who is not afraid to ask for a second opinion.

People write to me: “I’m not too good with words.” Well, none of us are, and we all need each other. Others say, “I never had much schooling, and a lot of your words are not familiar.” If so, I apologize for that. I am a Clinton, Iowa boy – now an old man – who is a learner and not a knower. I share with you what I have learned. If it is not helpful to you, or if it is completely wrong to your experience, it should be summarily rejected. You don’t offend me. On the contrary, you inform me you have your own mind, which I applaud.

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One of the sad commentaries of our times is an expression, which I find meaningless, which is “the best and the brightest.” I’ve written disparagingly of this term, and now I find Chris Hedges has topped me with “The Best and the Brightest Led America Off a Cliff.” He writes:

“The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredded constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the feet of our elite universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with most other elite schools, do a poor job educating students to think. They focus instead, through the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, advanced placement classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools and blind deference to all authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers. The collapse of the country runs in a direct line from the manicured quadrangles and halls in places like Cambridge, Princeton, New Haven to the financial and political centers of power.” (www.truthdig.com)

Like the moth to the light, the “best & the brightest” are attracted to power and money, and then act as obedient accomplices to power with the infallible right to manipulate the rest of us to their will and indulgence.

We elect people who are a “good average” like ourselves, and then those elected people appoint the “best & the brightest” to run the country when we know nothing about them, have never seen them on the campaign trail, never had an opportunity to pass judgment on them, but are exposed to them as the “experts” we need. These experts have gotten us into the mess we are now in, and have been doing so for more than a century now, or since the birth of the “specialist.” To wit:

Robert McNamara put Ford Motor Company in the ditch, and then came to Washington DC as a celebrated egghead, only to throw Vietnam into a similar ditch. He was one of the predecessors to the current crop of the “best & the brightest” described by Chris Hedges.

McNamara was a member of President John Fitzgerald Kenney’s “Camelot Cabinet,” whose members knew how to manipulate words as surrogate for results, and for this they were anointed with knighthood.

It may seem absurd now but in the Vietnam War “body count,” the number of killed Viet Cong, and the “interdiction” of supply routes from North Vietnam with “Agent Orange,” the equivalent of poison gas only to vegetation and to those unfortunately contaminated with it, were considered strategic military indices. We heard them on the Sunday morning television news programs form suave General Maxwell Taylor to agitated General William Westmoreland. The “best & the brightest” invented a whole new language to explain that war, and still lost it in embarrassing fashion.

As for JFK, he along with the “best & the brightest” orchestrated the “Bay of Pigs” fiasco and “Cuban Missile” crisis, and then initiated the insurgence into Vietnam, which would balloon after the president’s assassination into a full-scaled war. JFK was also tardy on the Civil Rights Movement but was rescued by Lyndon Johnson in carrying through on his promise.

The press loved JFK because he was witty, debonair, handsome and flattering. So, he was forgiven for his unsavory appetites and lackadaisical ways, among which was having been an indifferent student at Harvard, a “war hero” for losing his PT boat, an indifferent senator who often didn’t show up to vote, and a Pulitzer Prize winning author for a book he didn’t write. JFK won the presidency because he had that poise and panache that ingratiated him to the American people against Richard Nixon, who if not the devil certainly had stood in for his portrait.

As for Yale graduate President George W. Bush, he took office with a budget surplus and left office with the nation nearly $11 trillion in debt. So, today we’re in the worse financial shape since WWII with every American citizen carrying $33,000 of that debt.

President Bush initiated the entitlement plan of Medicare Part D for helping seniors with drug costs without any plan to pay for it. Medicare Part D is costing American taxpayers as much as the Iraq War today, and whereas the Iraq War will end one day, this goes on in perpetuity to the tune of $60 billion or more a year.

With 73 million baby boomers to turn 65 in 2012, with full Medicare and Medicaid benefits, a generation that has burned the candle at both ends, and is already in poor health, this demographic economic tsunami could push the yearly cost to these entitlements to more than $100 billion, or well beyond what Social Security cost today, the entitlement that always is singled out for abuse.

Because of the “best & the brightest” mismanagement of the national debt, it could rise to $23 trillion by 2019, far beyond the government’s income, or ability to tax the nation. Healthcare costs today are 5 percent of the budget, by 2050 that could loom to 20 percent.

Making the picture even bleaker, should the holders of our bonds, such as Europe, China and India refuse to loan us any more money, or change the currency from dollars to some other international standard, the United States of America, as we know it could cease to exist. This is the legacy of the “best & the brightest” (source: PBSTV Frontline, “Ten Trillion and Counting.”).

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There are a couple of other words, which I suspect the majority would agree to be negative words: narcissism and egoism.

“Narcissism” deals with self-love, but if we cannot love ourselves how can we love anyone else? Love is not the denial of self but emanates from the self. Conversely, the opposite of self-love is self-hate, and self-hatred only hands the control of self to others whom we deem better able to do so.

Actors and writers are narcissistic by definition, and yet some of the most generous and kind people in the world are of those vocations. They entertain rejection every day. No one knows better than they do that they cannot rest on their laurels as they are only accepted (or rejected) on the basis of their latest work.

Charlie Rose asked the late Michael Crighton, author of “Jurassic Park,” on PBS what it was like to be a celebrated author. Quite humbly, and honestly he replied, “Publishers look at my work when I send it to them. Other highly talented writers never see a reader much less the publisher.”

As for egoism, it is the belief in yourself, not that you are better than anyone else, but that you have the confidence you have something of value which you would like to share with others.

It is no accident that in Freud’s transactional analysis that the “Ego” is the Adult, the “Superego” is the Parent, and the “Id” is the Child. The “Ego” is the citadel of the individual as a person distinct from others with the logical balance to accept “what is,” whereas the “Superego” is “what should be,” and the “Id” is “whatever.”

Remember Freud’s construction is an attempt to describe; it is not a prescription. He saw the Parent or the "Superego" as the critical judge of behavior and called it the "Morality Principle." He saw the "Ego" as the nonjudgmental adult or the "Reality Principle.” He saw the "Id" as the self-indulgent or impulsive child, or the "Pleasure Principle."

Another way he looked at these three stages was the "Parent" (the affect or feeling), "Adult" (cognitive or thinking) and the "Id" as (conative or behaving). I cover this in some detail in THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996).

Self-negating ourselves does not humble us, but instead humiliates us, causing us to hide in our pride with all kinds of aberrancies. It is not wrong to think well of yourself. It is far more important that we do than to rely on anyone else to do it for us. Remember there is a “Parent” and “Adult” and “Child” in each of us throughout our lives, and whichever one has the upper hand determines whether we will be an emotional cripple or a self-reliant and self-directed contributing citizen.

There is much that can be lost in translation if we fail to get inside words, and understand what they mean to us. My da was convinced I believed everything I read. I told him I believed everything I knew to be true. He shook his head and lit a cigarette on the end of the cigarette he was smoking not realizing the one he was smoking wasn’t burned down.


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Finally, I was teaching a course in “Theory & Thought in Organizational Development.” It was an OD course at the university in the Graduate Program for an MBA. Several of my students were officers in the United States Air Force and in pilot training at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. One day this student, a USAF lieutenant, about age 26, stood up in class and went through a three-minute harangue.

It was confrontational and accusatory, as well as honest and sincere as to his assessment of my teaching style. He was, in a word, outraged. He said he wasn’t learning anything, that he was incredibly frustrated, that I didn’t use the text, that he had no purchase of how he could possibly get a good grade in the course, that several times he wanted to punch me in the nose; that this class was a travesty of the education process. “I’m fed up,” he said as he slammed his books down hard on his desk and made to walk out using that famous “f--- you” expression in his retreat.

I stopped him with this rejoinder, “Welcome to OD!”

With that simple remark, I totally defused that young man, and I was not much older being only in my thirties. He just stood there. His face was red and he had white lines around his ears and neck as if drained of blood, perspiring and shaking as if suffering a chill. He was so traumatized by “Welcome to OD” that he could not move.

I let him anguish there, while the class was as silent as a morgue, and then said,

“Dr. Fisher is not a mechanic, not a Machine Age Thinker. He left the god of the machine a long time ago. He planned to suffer this class until it got it if it took all semester.

“Therefore, Dr. Fisher wants to applaud you for finally getting through all those artificial barriers holding you back from your real self. In confronting me you had to first confront yourself, and with the exception of the expletives, I have no disagreement with what you have said. All of what you have said is true.

“But within that truth is what we call ‘OD,’ and as you already know I am suspect of the discipline although I practice as well as teach it. I don’t want your acquiescence; indeed, I don’t want your approval. I want your mind, your heart, and your soul to zero in on the material and make it yours to use in the service of others.

“I am a student of OD, have had great success with it, but am still struggling to define what it is. I can describe it but I cannot prescribe for it. How it has worked for me may not work for you. So, when and if it works for you it doesn’t follow that it will necessarily work for someone else in the same manner. You cannot copy it, imitate it, distill and package it; you must experience it by bringing your heart and soul, mind and body to the effort. I am a facilitator not a formulator.

“I don’t want your submission or your permission to see OD as I see it. I want your total person immersed in OD, as that is what it requires. It isn’t a discipline by the numbers, or a cause and effect linear progression. You may use such devices but when it works it pops intuitively into your psyche and you know what to do and how to do it because you have captured the collective mind of the enterprise with which you are working. You know but you don’t know how you know you just know.

“Until you break through that artificial barrier, until you penetrate your programmed shell you are wasting your OD potential and wasting my time. I would imagine several of you feel the same way.” I looked across a sea of intense faces giving nothing away. “Some of you will never get it. We can’t all be neural surgeons and we certainly can’t all be OD psychologists.

“With this verbal explosion, you all witnessed, there was also an implosion. I’m not trying to be cute. I mean what I’m saying. He projected his angst on to me, and in doing so ran into himself. He penetrated that heavy quiet that commands.” Then addressing him again directly, I said,

“That heavy quiet is not enough. I am willing to tell you now that in breaking through to me,” looking at him, “you have broken through to yourself. You will never be the same again. You never feel the same comfort of denial. You will see what others refuse or unable to see. That is the epitome of OD.

“I know I sometimes seem squirrelly because I’m not conventional. It is true I don’t pay attention to the text; I talk a lot about my own exploits; I don’t flatter you and assure you and try to win you because I’m not interested. I’m far more interested in your paying attention to yourself and your experience, interpreting yours in terms of mine, than having you comfortable here in my OD laboratory. You are in my petri dish.” Some laughter.

“Last semester I gave an ‘A’ to a student with a handwritten paper, who said some of the same things you have said, clearly indicating that he got it, and that he was going to use it the rest of his life, and so will you.”

* * *

Later, I learned that this officer had been on the bubble to be booted out of flight school, not for physical impairment but for psychological problems. He expected my OD course to be the solution to his difficulties, a kind of course of the last resort. When he found that not to be the case, his frustrations mounted.

He wrote me a letter several months later. He said he earned his wings, and that he was now in advance training as a fighter pilot and couldn’t be happier. His marriage was going better; in fact, his whole life was looking up. He wanted to give me credit for it, but wrote, “I know you wouldn’t accept that.” Then he confessed this, “I’ll bet you wonder what led me to lose it in class. I didn’t know at the time. I found the answer in another course when I came across the term, ‘reaction formation.’ You said one word that ticked me off and all my accumulated frustrations, many frustrations far removed from you and your class, seemed to prick my balloon and all hell broke lose. What was that word? You’ll never know if you can’t recall. It is sacred and secret to me, and who knows, I may use it one day.”

He had a postscript. “You’ve taught me that words are powerful. Were you not you on that day I exploded, I don’t know what would have happened to me, or my career, but I thank you. We’ll probably never meet again but I plan to pass your wisdom on if I can.” He ended it there.

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