TRUST, THE PALLIATIVE TO PESSIMISM!

TRUST, THE PALLIATIVE TO PESSIMISM!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 2, 2009

“Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.”

Golda Meir (1898 – 1978), Israeli Founder and Prime Minister

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Like the time of Erasmus, the whole societal scheme of things seems to be coming apart. The order of society as it has been known is not only changing but also disestablishing. What was isn’t anymore; what will be is not at all certain. Moral clarity and moral authority have taken a holiday. Little makes sense. With the world reduced to random chaos, paranoia and conspiracy theories are rampant. Nothing can be taken at face value. Trust is not only at issue. Trust has been reduced to rhetoric and discourse, not behavior.

Pessimism has taken on apocalyptic proportions. Pessimistic ideas of an incipient apocalypse are not new. Such ideas can be traced back to 1400 BC. More recently with two world wars in the twentieth century followed by the stalemate of Korea and the defeat in Vietnam, gloom and doom have been popular with a vocal fringe of the population.

This pessimism was given credence with the doom machine, the atomic bomb, which was dropped not once but twice on Japan in WWII to a largely civilian population. How could a civilized nation even in warfare do such a thing? Well, the most democratic freethinking and open society could and did, the United States of America.

Forget the rationale of justification. The fact remains. It was done. “Apocalypse Now” happened in my lifetime with more than 200,000 souls perishing. Subsequent to that the doom machine as nuclear and hydrogen bomb has become metaphor for Armageddon.

This gave way in the 1960s and 1970s to an arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Now, there are tens of thousands of these nuclear bombs that cannot be destroyed and will remain potential radioactive contaminants for thousands of years into the future. This is why, while we're on the subject, that pessimistic philosophers have been so active in our culture, as I will attempt to show shortly.

The fear of “Apocalypse Now” was again renewed with the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States and the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City by Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization al-Qaeda. Preemptive war followed in Afghanistan and Iraq, which continues as this is being written.

Trust-mistrust, what psychoanalyst Erik Erikson claims fundamental to our early development, has been a pendulum in the story of man, as has pessimism and optimism, utopia and dystopia. We have vacillated between extremes since the dawn of man, but now the consequences are immutable. We will look at each of these briefly in an attempt to show how trust is indeed the palliative of last resort.

UTOPIA

Five hundred years ago, Sir Thomas More published “Utopia” (1516), the ideal society, which described a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean, possessing a seemingly perfect socio-politico-legal system. It was the dawn of the Protestant Reformation, the collapsing power of Roman Catholicism, the disestablishment of feudalism, and the changing nature of commerce. This was not meant to be a realistic blueprint for a working nation, but as satire to reveal the England of his time.

The word “utopia” means in Greek, “no-place,” or nowhere. “Nowhere man” was, to be sure, in “nowhere land.” Sir Thomas, who loved word play, as did his friend, Erasmus, knew such an ideal place to be realistically impossible. The irony is that twenty-first century man with his ambivalence towards global warming, fossil fuel consumption, and coal-burning factories fits the idea of “nowhere man in nowhere land.”

Sir Thomas based his utopia on Plato’s “Republic” (4th century BC),” where equality and pacifism reign although citizens were prepared to fight if need be. The evils of society such as poverty and misery were removed. There were few laws and no lawyers. A philosopher king ruled with compassion encouraging a tolerance of all religions. There have been other most recent utopias.

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Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward” (1888) rationalized the case for an economic revolution. Looking back from the year 2000, he envisioned a fulfilled society of social and economic equality. This was followed by William Morris’ “News from Nowhere” (1891). Morris, a man of remarkable social and economic vision, was an inspiration to Albert Hubbard’s Roftcroft Shops. Much later, there was Eric Frank Russell’s “The Great Explosion” (1962). Russell detailed an economic and social utopia with the idea of Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS), where capitalism was in the hands of the people. Science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein’s followed with, “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” (1966). It portrays an individualistic and libertarian utopia driven by capitalism.

Capitalist utopias are generally based on free market economies, the supposition being that private enterprise and personal initiative without government coercion or interference provide the best formula for the individual and society. That is being severely challenged here in the early twenty-first century as President Barak Obama attempts to establish a social democratic form of capitalism with an expanded welfare state. What is often overlooked in such schemes is that the more the government does for and to us the less freedom we have to for ourselves. This is the great distinction between unbridled capitalism and welfare socialism.

Wendell Willkie, a midwestern corporate lawyer in the Republican Party, ran against President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940. He had a utopian vision of a “world economic order.” That vision nearly three quarters of a century later is gaining traction after the global financial meltdown and recession of 2008. He may not have anticipated world finance uncoupling from the real economy, but he could see national boundaries becoming less relevant. Willkie lost to FDR in 1940 in a landslide receiving only 82 electoral votes to FDR’s 449.

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There have been many religious utopias. The most notable in our culture is the Biblical Garden of Eden. Religious utopias are based on religious ideals, and are commonly found in most societies. Members are expected to follow and believe in the particular religious tradition that established the utopia. The Islamic, Jewish, and Christian ideas of the Garden of Eden and Heaven may be interpreted as forms of utopianism.

The attraction of such utopias are the mindset they create of “gardens of delight” free of worry in a state of continuous bliss. They envision a place of freedom from sin, pain, poverty, and death, and even communion with saints and angels. The Hindu concept of Moksha and the Buddhist concept of Nirvana are kinds of utopias. The difference is that they are a state of mind, not a place. They hold the belief that with meditation a quiet mind without thought enables a person to reach enlightenment.

In contrast to this, there is the Irish-English medieval 12th century utopia, which was known as the “Land of Cokaygne.” In German, this tradition was referred to as “Schlaraffenland,” or the “poor man’s heaven.” Here pure hedonism reigns supreme.

This popular fantasy was a foil for the innocent and instinctively virtuous life that is depicted in the Bible. Cokaygne is a land of extravagance and excess rather than simplicity and piety. There is freedom from work, and every material thing is free and available. Cooked larks fly straight into one’s mouth, the rivers run with wine, sexual promiscuity is the norm; and there is a fountain of youth, which keeps everyone young and active. This sounds as if a chapter out of the Playboy Philosophy of Hugh Hefner. It also has much in common with the Sexual Revolution of the past fifty years. The fact that our culture has tired of Playboy and swinging as utopias suggest even in our dreams we tire of the good life.

DYSTOPIA

The common trait to dystopias is that they are negative or undesirable societies. In general, they are visions of a future peopled with dangerous or alienating civilizations. It has been a creative vehicle for writers to criticize current trends and cultures. In the examples that follow, it will be nigh impossible for the reader not to see the connection to the world they currently inhabit.

There is the influential “We” (1921) by the Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin. People in “We” are permitted to live out of public view for only an hour a day. They are not only referred to by numbers instead of names, but are neither “citizens” nor “people,” but “ciphers.” In this digital age, everything is reduced to “0 and 1,” and we all know who we are by our social security numbers, credit card numbers, cell phone numbers, etc. We are also under constant ubiquitous scrutiny visually and electronically wherever we go.

The “We” story influenced George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), Ayn Rand’s “Anthem” (1946), Ursula Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed” (1974), and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s “Player Piano” (1952). Zamyatin’s legacy is also apparent in T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land” (1922), Franz Kafka’s novel, “The Trial” (1925), Aldous Huxley’s novel, “Brave New World” (1932), and Samuel Beckett’s play, “Waiting for Godot” (1952), all works that express deep pessimism for our future.

You get a sense that these authors are attempting to warn us of our own gullibility to the rhetoric of our leaders. In “Brave New World” the establishment of the state lopped off the tops of all crosses (symbols of Christianity) to make “T’s” (symbols of Ford’s Model T), where children are reproduced artificially, and the concept of “mother” and “father” is considered obscene.

We live in an age where the expression “Merry Christmas” has come into disrepute if not self-conscious denial to be replaced by the anodyne, “Happy Holidays.” “Brave New World” is also apparent in the bizarre behavior sponsored by “in vitro fertilization.” We have single parent Nadya Suleman, 33, already the mother of six conceived in this manner, giving birth to a set of octuplets in the same fashion in 2009.

This young lady is an unemployed student, living on student loans, collecting food stamps, and vying for a disability pension, while living with her mother in a three-bedroom house. The home is at risk of foreclosure and could be sold at auction by mid-2009. Suleman’s mother, who cares for her six children at home, is $23, 225 behind in her mortgage payments as of February 2009.

Television psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw, who interviewed Suleman, stating that as many as seventy people will be needed to work with these premature babies for the next four years, at a cost in the six figures each year. Yet, the poster girl for in vitro fertilization doesn’t get it, and remains seemingly on phased with the prospects. She is right out of “Brave New World.”

In Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985), the religion is the state and is enforced with secular dystopian rule. The novel explores themes of women in subjugation against the backdrop of a totalitarian pseudo-Christian theocracy. She sees the theocracy overthrowing the United States government in the near future. It is the Taliban in Christian dress and behavioral codes to impose social control and draconian religious conformity within the new society. We see the dangers of theocracy today everywhere especially with regards to the suppression of women. While blatant in countries of Islam, it is subtler in Christian countries.

In Ray Bradbury’s futuristic “Fahrenheit 451” (1953), American society is hedonistic and critical thought through reading is outlawed. Books are burned and ignite at 451 degrees Fahrenheit. Bradbury saw a dumbing down of American society where high school graduates couldn’t read, can’t do simple calculations, and many college graduates can’t read a timetable or balance a checkbook. Bradbury took aim at this dysfunction only to have his book viewed as popular science fiction entertainment.

H. G. Wells had a similar theme in “When the Sleeper Wakes” (1899), where the ruling class is hedonistic and shallow, whereas Jack London in “The Iron Heel” (1908) portrays rulers as brutal, fanatical and sadistic.

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With economic dystopia, a commonly occurring theme is that the state is in control of the economy at the expense of free enterprise. In Ayn Rand’s novella, “Anthem” (1938), she envisions mankind entering another Dark Age as a result of the evils of irrationality and collectivism along with the weaknesses of socialistic thinking and economics. In “Anthem,” some unspecified time in the future technological advancement is now all consuming and carefully planned. The concept of individuality has been eliminated – the word “I” has disappeared from the language.

Rand’s “Anthem” is offered as a parable. But the author, who died in 1982, were she to be alive today would see President Barak Obama moving the United States toward “Anthem,” or from its relatively modest welfare state toward European-style social democracy with health care reform, education reform, work and compensation reform, and a new energy policy as invasive government becomes the last option in saving us from ourselves.

Rand’s objectivism was a philosophy of man as hero of his own destiny, allowed by the freedom of choice to seek his own happiness and create his own moral purpose in life through productive achievement and the use of his reason.

President Obama has an apparent personal mandate to provide these for American citizens. Pundits compare his challenge to that of Lincoln’s of the Civil War and Roosevelt’s of the Great Depression, which are both false positives to his challenges as neither man was on the same slippery slope that he is.

In Lois Lowry’s “The Giver” (1993), a society goes from utopia to dystopia. Written for children, it is the story of the twelfth year of the life of a boy named “Jonas.” He becomes the “Giver,” or receiver of the memories from the previous receiver, only to discover how shallow is his community and meaningless everyone’s life. “Control” is the operational word in the world of Jonas, control of violence, poverty, prejudice, injustice, sexuality, love and emotions in a culture of Sameness. Only Jonas as the receiver carries the memories before Sameness was in place. It is a burden too great, and he attempts to escape.

The reason the book is timely is because with increased control and mounting intrusive surveillance of our private lives, individualism is at risk. In “The Giver,” this has all been sacrificed for security and ease. It was a price too great for Jonas. The question is: what price our security today?

PESSIMISM

Pessimism, as with dystopia, negatively colors the perception of life, especially with regard to the future. We are all familiar with the glass “half full” or “half empty.” The pessimist sees the glass half empty, while the optimist sees the glass half full. Pessimism throughout history has had its effects on all major areas of thinking, unfortunately, largely after the fact. Philosophers in the main have been pessimists with their insights and warnings sometimes not heeded until hundreds of years after they were envisioned.

We live in a Western society that also says “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” It is precisely when it isn’t broken that it can be renovated, reenergized, reformulated and redirected without negative consequences. It is waiting until it is broken that we suffer individually and collectively to our regret.

Yet, given our character and our society, the combination of always seeing the glass “half full,” and not acting until something fails remains inevitable. We are a reactive society that chooses to believe if you “think” positively the results will be positive; if you are optimistic, the grounds of pessimism will dissipate as if they were never there. It is a philosophy predicated on hope believing hope will lead to courage, courage will lead to action, and action will lead to dispelling the angst that belies our comfort. We have irrevocably driven a wedge between critical thinking and creative thinking to our despair.

It is no accident that roads most taken have been away from pessimism and into the arms of optimism with the narcotic hope finding us falling off the cliff into the abyss over and over, and over again. We think no matter how stupid we act there is always sufficient time, opportunity and resilience to manage the faux pas.

My lifetime has been spent not listening to Gregorian Chants, which I must confess I love, but to the constant staccato of self-help gurus with their mumble jumble, and cacophony of self-help books rolling off the presses and falling into my lap. Self-help has been the new religion from health, wealth, and well being, to thinking our way into some kind of Nirvana.

Self-help has been an addiction since Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” (1937) published during the Great Depression. Hill summarized the achievements of five hundred of the richest Americans with the philosophy “what you can conceive you can achieve.” Following WWII, the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale put this into evangelical terms with “The Power of Positive Thinking” (1952). Peale, who had no mental health credentials, spun a tale of psychological positivism that resulted in his associate, Dr. Smiley Blanton, breaking with him for its misleading superficiality.

Peale also came under heavy criticism from the mental health community for his controversial work, but the American public loved it because it didn’t ask it to do anything, but be “positive.” It was on the New York Times bestseller list for 186 consecutive weeks and sold more than 5 million copies.

Blanton wrote “Love or Perish” (1955), which posited the Freudian duality of Eros (love-life-constructiveness) and Thanatos (death-hate-destructiveness), which he claimed exists in relative balance in the healthy person. Blanton wrote:

“Love is a harmonious attitude toward life in general. It is a steady, unflinching desire for constructive action, which permeates the whole personality. Love is a basic emotional approach that we must develop in our work, in our relationship with other people, and also in our attitude toward ourselves. Modern psychiatry teaches us that we fall ill, emotionally and physically, if we do not use love in this way to guide and control our behavior.”

Blanton’s book sold modestly and few today remember the wisdom of his words, but many writers have taken up his themes including this one.

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A century ago, when optimism celebrated the utopian promise of communism, many pessimists were shouted into silence. The idea of communism has proven false or even evil, yet the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall in 1989 has failed to dim this inclination all evidence to the contrary. We have a weakness for utopias.

Reason itself, once valued as a beacon of objective truth, has come in for criticism as used by pessimists. This is so despite the fact that nature has fallen victim to problematic population growth and environmental decline. The pessimists wave their ecological banners of global warming and birth control largely to no one in sight. Pessimists observe trends; evaluate patterns and project consequences and report that things in general are going from bad to worse. They are considered bleeding hearts and shouted down. Societal implications for this inclination are we must have our cake and eat it to even should the ingredients disappear.

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German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) came to value “will” above reason as the mainspring of human thought and behavior. Will is reality; and for him, the world is “idea.”

In his book, “The World of Will and Idea” (1818), he argues everything that exists is a manifestation of will. Man’s life should be an attempt to see this fact clearly and to recognize that the will brings nothing but suffering.

The will is a random, irrational, and destructive force. The most satisfactory life, then, is one that succeeds in extinguishing itself, not by suicide, but by an elimination of the will. Schopenhauer, who was an ascetic, claims the escape, which he knew few were capable of taking, is to deny the will. His wisdom was in the truth of what he said not in the behavior he advocated.

He concludes that life is full of inherent misery. Life is pain. Will inspires desire, and desire is a constant reminder of the things in life that we lack. If we do not satisfy our desires, frustration and pain increase. Our problem is that we are aware of our rampaging will and suffer from that knowledge.

We do self-destructive things that are out of character and baffle us after the fact. Why do accountants embezzle funds? Why do investment bankers commit fraud? Why do members of the clergy seek out whores or abuse children? Why do teachers corrupt children in their care? Why do average citizens eat, drink and smoke themselves to an early grave? Schopenhauer would say it was a matter of their will.

The will on the rampage follows its own singular path. The more we know the more it hurts is his pessimistic and depressing worldview. Love is an illusion; the sexual drive is “the will to live,” which he defines as the inherent drive within us, and all creatures.

Reason is mere window dressing for what really matters to us. Our will gets us into trouble because our reason is weak. That is why society has the problems of obesity, alcoholism, emphysema, promiscuity, drug abuse, and crime. Our will, which seeks comfort and pleasure, drives us but our selfish desires instead cause us pain and conflict. We are in a biological war of all against all, and ultimately we wear ourselves out with reason being too lame to stop our self-destruction.

Looking back on life, Schopenhauer suggests, what we thought were random events, chance meetings, and coincidences appear to be logically ordered in hindsight. He writes, “Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable facts in the composition of a consistent plot.” So who composed this plot? He answers, “Just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you.”

The only thing man can know is the idea, the world is idea, all that we ever know is known by means of the ideas we have about objects. We do not know the sun and earth in any direct way, but only in relation to our own experience. We speak through our experience. All that in any way belongs or can belong to us is conditioned through the subject. Schopenhauer argues further that if we look deeply into ourselves we can discover not only our own inner nature but also that of the whole universe. The underlying reality of the world is one vast WILL, a non-rational aimless urge that is the source of suffering.

Schopenhauer, who was influenced by Eastern thought including the Vedas, Upanishads and Buddhism, echoes the sentiment of the Buddha, who sees life as “the joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.” This philosopher has influenced many other philosophers including Nietzsche and Freud. His work anticipated Western man’s discontent as a result of falling away from the comforting dogma of religions.

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Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) shares some of Schopenhauer’s ideas. Rather than the inanimate “will,” he sees us being under constant attack from within the “self,” a combination of the forces of nature and from relations with others. This is apparent in “Civilization and Its Discontent”(1930), which is an analysis of the inescapable tensions that afflict us from an increasingly sick society.

“Civilization and Its Discontent” is a psychoanalytical book and stands as a witness to his theories of the mind. He likens the mind to an iceberg. The conscious mind, that part that we are aware of, is the tip of the iceberg. The other nine-tenths of the iceberg is our unconscious mind. The unconscious mind exercises a far greater control over our actions than we realize. In writing of our discontent, he has this to say:

“What we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this contention astonishing because, in whatever way we may define the concept of civilization, it is a certain fact that all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization . . . but a factor of this kind of hostile to civilization must already have been at work in the victory of Christendom over the heathen religions. For it was very closely related to the low estimation put upon earthly life by the Christian doctrine.”

And elsewhere:

“The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization, though then, it is true, it had for the most part no value, since the individual was scarcely in a position to defend it. The development of civilization imposes restrictions on it, and justice demands that no one shall escape those restrictions. What makes itself felt in a human community as a desire for freedom may be their revolt against some existing injustice, and so many prove favorable to a further development of civilization; it may remain compatible with civilization. But it may also spring from the remains of their original personality, which is still untamed by civilization and may thus become the basis in them of hostility to civilization.”

Freud anticipates the dangers of progress being our most important product; of technology superseding the individual; of the human will being lost in the drive for wealth creation at any cost; and of a farcical morality that serves the needs of the state at the expense of the individual.

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German philosopher and historian Oswald Spengler (1880 1936) is best known for “The Decline of the West” (1918 – 1923). He was a man who could be eloquent at times, but also blunt: “Optimism is cowardice.” His description of the West fits some of Schopenhauer’s contentions, seeing Western Civilization striving for the unattainable, making Western man a proud but tragic figure, for what he strives to create he secretly knows will never be achieved.

His “Decline” came out after the end of WWI, the perceived German humiliation at the Treaty of Versailles followed by the economic depression of 1923. This caused hyperinflation of the German currency, mass unemployment and civil unrest, along with the collapse of industry and commerce. The book comforted Germans as it seemingly rationalized their downfall as part of larger world-historical processes.

Spengler’s murkiness, intuitionalism, and mysticism, while being the target for his critics, represented an influence on such American writers as Henry Miller, John dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. His work fell into intellectual disrepute and then obscurity following World War II.

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English writer G. K. Chesterton (1874 – 1936) took issue with both pessimists (such as Spengler) and their optimistic critics, arguing that neither took into consideration human choice:

“The pessimists believe that the cosmos is a clock that is running down, the progressives believe it is a clock that they themselves are winding up. But I happen to believe that the world is what we choose to make it, and that we are what we choose to make ourselves; and that our renascence or our ruin will alike, ultimately and equally, testify with a trumpet to our liberty.”

Hear! Hear!

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Not all pessimists are remote or far removed from today. Stephen King’s “Pet Cemetery,” which suggests nothing works. Pessimism is also prominent in the works of Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Karl Barth, and Anthony Burgess to name a few. In the latter’s “A Clockwork Orange,” there is little government control while criminals become a law unto themselves establishing the chaos of control. As covered earlier, this is what happened in the Houston Police Department, the Raleigh Police Department, and the Fairfax County Police Department. Philosophers, novelists, and other artists often find their theories, fictions and abstractions confirmed in reality.

TRUST

Confident Thinking embraces all these indulgences to arrive at the common ground of trust. Many dissimilar patterns make up the quilt of life. Anything is possible with trust, and the person you must trust the most is yourself.

The past five hundred years have been traumatic, true, but also exciting and glorious. With the breakup of the European feudal system, people were lifted from bondage and poverty. With the rise of Protestantism and capitalism, and the colonization of the New World, Western society stretched across the Atlantic, true, at the expense of the indigenous people of the new land. But the question must still be asked: if not then, when?

Imagine being alive during that earlier transformation. When explorers came back from the New World and told tales of Native Americans living in organized harmony without the Western God, Europeans, for a period, “went native,” imitating the primitives in manner and dress, and what was assumed behavior without societal constrains. In retrospect, it seems comical, but illustrates how fragile our central belief systems are when introduced to contradictory data. We have always been egocentric at our peril.

Europeans failed to realize they had been introduced to another culture in another place and different circumstances of equal and comparable cultural relevance. Why has Western man cultivated the idea that God-centered Europe was superior to other people? What has Western man destroyed because of his ignorance and self-conceit? We shall never know

Nature was God to Native Americans, not something to conquer but to live within its bosom in spiritual harmony. They worshipped the animals they killed to clothed, feed, shelter, and succor their needs. Everything had a spiritual and material connection. As time went on, Europeans discovered that the people of this new continent were many tribes and nations, diverse and different, warring and as territorial as Europeans.

Differences, however, led Native Americans and Europeans to be weary and confused and fearful of each other as people of difference. We are today in yet another transformation.

The earlier challenges were more apparent, more tangible. They could be seen and touched and dealt with directly. Today, we are in the Information Age, where the Internet increasingly dominates, and many things exist only in cyberspace. Our enemies do not always wear uniforms or represent constituted governments. They may dress, appear, and act like us as ordinary citizens, but have a bomb strapped to their person. Terrorism is not territorial in the land sense but in the mind sense, where it can do the ultimate damage. It is where pessimism resides.

Those who mean us harm we don’t know where they are, or how to identify them from those that mean us no harm. We have become a paranoid society willing to give up our freedoms and individualism to appease our suspicions. Now, everyone is a possible terrorist and therefore we give the government the right to invade everyone’s privacy. Perhaps less than one-tenth of one-tenth of one percent could be rightly identified as terrorists. So, to be sure, we suspect everyone as a possibility. It is a catch-22. Fear of the unknown has taken on yet another fixation.

Those not so despairing nor so inclined have muddled us through the past 500 years. The palliative to this pessimism now is the same that it was then, trust, or Confident Thinking in the belief we are equal to the challenge. We have a history. It would seem an invisible hand is pushing us forward. It is not only changing how we live but also how we act in love and war, in peace and harmony with each other. War has been a constant in my life.

(1) I was born in the Great Depression, an economic war,

(2) An adolescent during World War II, a nuclear war of attrition.

(3) Teenager in the Korean War, a war never declared.

(4) A college student during the opening chapters of the Cold War,

(5) College graduate in the draft years,

(6) A US Navy enlisted man before the Viet Nam War,

(7) An executive in South Africa during Apartheid, where I witnessed from afar the cultural breakdown in the US in 1968 during the Vietnam war,

(8) I raised my family during the Civil Rights Movement, Sexual Revolution and Feminine Movement, when kids declared war on parents, imitating the behavior of the Hippies, Yuppies and “me” generations,

(9) I retired the first time, went back to school for six years to earn a Ph.D. during the ambivalent 1970s against the backdrop of the War on Crime, War on Drugs, the Law & Order craze, the Watergate fiasco, and the Iran Hostage Crisis,

(10) I reentered industry as an executive working in Europe as the EEC was being formed to combat Europe’s decline against the rising sun of the Far East,

(11) I retired a second time during the First Gulf War of President George H. W. Bush,

(12) I am now a senior citizen as the Second Gulf War, War in Afghanistan, and War on Terror of President George W. Bush bleeds over into the presidency of President Barak Obama accompanied by a global economic crisis.

The War on Terror is mirroring cyberspace. Again, it is this invisible hand. It would be easy to lose confidence and retreat into cynicism and pessimism fed by uncertainty and despair in the growing randomness to life. That would be a mistake because the pattern of life throughout history indicates that right always triumphs in the end. It just takes a little time.

SOLDIERS OF TRUST

Stanford professor Jack R. Gibb built his whole career on the venue of trust in terms of personal and organizational development (OD). It was the central core to his philosophy. He asserts:

“Trust, unhappily, is not a part of the American or global, political way of life. In fact, our present national culture – social, economic, even artistic, as well as political – is inhospitable to trust.”

Trust, he asserts, functions as a lubricant of individual and social life. Trust makes it unnecessary to examine motives, look for hidden meanings, or put it in writing. Indeed, trust makes it unnecessary for television gurus, priests, ministers, lawyers, therapists, or governmental bureaucrats to intervene in our interest because we understand each other, trust each other, and accept each other as we are. Trust finds us in charge.

Trust has been defined as confidence, but it is more than that. It is Confident Thinking. Trust is derived from the German word “Trost,” which means “comfort.” This implies an instinctive and unquestioning belief that what a person says he means. Confidence implies conscious trust because of good reasons, definite evidence, or past experience. Confidence is more cerebral, and yes more calculating than blind trust, but that is the world we live in, and why Confident Thinking is so critical today.

A Confident Thinker as these pages have alluded uses his mind and body to create the sense of trust. Fear stops the flow and arouses the defenses. Another way of looking at it is that when the “mindbodyspirit,” as Gibb puts it, alerts you that something is awry, it probably is. Caution is not bad, but it is not trust. Trust enriches experience, fear robs it. Trust begets trust, fear escalates fear.

Trust and fear are keys to our understanding each other and our social systems. They are social catalysts to human living. When trust is high, social systems function well; when trust is low, social systems break down. We see this in the home, in the school, in the workplace, and in society in general. Currently the “confidence level,” in other words the trust level, in the economy is low. Trust is an integrating and synergistic mechanism. We see this in sports teams, project teams in school, and in the mobilization of resources in the workplace for key programs.

Fear constrains and blocks trust. Often management in the workplace is a barrier to productivity for reasons of distrust. Corpocracy, or the authoritarian disposition of the complex organization, based on anachronistic management and atavistic managers, is manifestly distrusting. Trust is a releasing process that cuts through the pessimism and “can’t do” with the creative freedom that allows the flow of energy to a project to go unimpeded. Micromanagement, which is the embodiment of corpocracy, is the converse of this process.

We have often spoken here of a Culture of Contribution. It is a climate that transcends fear, allows conflicts to be managed, anticipates disagreements and deals with them with dispatch in an environment that nourishes personal growth, individual contribution, holistic health, and spiritual commitment to a task.

In the human group, it is not sameness that indicates the trust level, but mutual understanding. Trust is a process involved in continuous discovery. We are not comparing and competing but recognizing our interdependence with others to complete the essence of the task. We don’t need to apologize or defend our limitations, but to recognize the complementary nature of collective contribution.

We know we are being consumed with pessimism when we move away from ourselves as persons and try to be everything to everybody and nothing to ourselves; when we become obsessed with wearing masks while moving away from our authentic self; when we fail to differentiate needs from wants, and become a slave to desires that cannot be fulfilled; when we look first for answers outside ourselves and develop a dependence that constantly minimizes our personal authority to ourselves; and when we over perceive and over react to those who have a legitimate role to perform as our leaders.

Trust is also a matter of being in the flow and rhythm of the experience. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote, “Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience” (1990), which is consistent with Gibb’s thesis. He sees this flow in terms of happiness. Yet, what is happiness but trust in the flow and rhythm of the process?

Both psychologists from different generations and perspectives see creating a vision and the clarity of experience as providing the ultimate return. They see the wisdom of self-caring. This nurtures our redemptive and spiritual processes.

They acknowledge no life is without some bumpy roads. They support an open and trusting life guided by an open system, that is, a system of endeavor that is not afraid to embrace our fears to soar beyond them.

Yet one of the hardest obstacles to this flow is what Schopenhauer called “the will.” We go along to get along, jump in and out of one desire patch after another with hardly a glance backwards, that is, until everything catches up with us, finding ourselves out of sync and out of focus with little energy to go forward.

People who deal with ideas are first self-critical and self-analytical. Out of this come their ideas. I am no exception. Long ago, I recognized I handled stress poorly. I learned it in playing athletics. Once learned, I knew I had no choice but to focus my energies by being disciplined, orderly, composed and prepared almost to the point of being robotic. It was my method of being a Confident Thinker reducing constraints and dealing with the fears that constrained me. I know fear and constraints are in a very real sense illusionary. That does not make them less problematical. As we are all thinkers, we compose our ideas out of our awareness, accept that awareness as being our nature, and then embrace our illusions to master them to insights. Thinking man has used this formula for eternity.

Another lesson of trust that came to me through experience was environmental design. I didn’t come to understand it until I was a man, but realized, then, that I had experienced it all my life. I am an intense individual by nature wound as tight as piano wires and flourish or flounder depending on the climate of my experience. My mother trusted herself and projected that trust unto me; my da mistrusted himself and projected that mistrust unto to me as well. The product of that conflict and ambivalence has pushed and pulled me through life. It is no secret that I would have had a very different life had I not been drawn to my mother’s trust and away from my da’s mistrust. Yet, at another level, it has been my da’s caution that has spared me deep embarrassment. I am a product of that environmental design. It is no doubt the reason I’ve been attracted to organizational development, which is all about trust and mistrust in human ecological systems.

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Erik Erikson, the famous psychoanalyst, who has become the quintessential architect of personal identity, was born out of wedlock. His mother’s second husband later adopted him. He never knew who had fathered him. The problem was exacerbated by the loving deceit of his mother and foster father, thinking he was their flesh and blood, and not adopted. It was an emotional experience critical to his eventual career. Trust and mistrust as well as identity were to become cornerstones of his work. He could have retreated into morose and pessimism but instead built a career out of the deception. You sense the torque of this conflict in all his writings.

He writes in “Identity Youth and Crisis” (1968):

“What we call ‘trust’ coincides with what Therese Benedek has called ‘confidence.’ If I prefer the word ‘trust,’ it is because there is more naiveté and more mutuality in it: an infant can be said to be trusting, but it would be assuming too much to say that he has confidence. The general state of trust, furthermore, implies not only that one has learned to rely on the sameness and continuity of the outer providers but also that one may trust oneself and the capacity of one’s own organs to cope with urges, that one is able to consider oneself trustworthy enough so that the providers will not need to be on guard or to leave.”

Elsewhere he writes:

“Basic mistrust, then, is the sum of all those diffuse experiences which are not somehow successfully balanced by the experience of integration. One cannot know what happens in a baby, but direct observation as well as overwhelming clinical evidence indicate that early mistrust is accompanied by an experience of ‘total’ rage . . ..In adults a radical impairment of basic trust and a prevalent of basic mistrust is expressed in a particular form of severe estrangement which characterizes individuals who withdraw into themselves when at odds with themselves and others.”


We are reminded of Schopenhauer’s declaration that by looking deeply within ourselves we can discover not only our own inner nature but also that of the entire universe. You get that impression in reading Erikson. He sees mistrust as being deprived, divided, abandoned and deceived as creating the residue of basic mistrust. He posits the assumption that the generational differences that disrupt traditions can become disturbances that lead to mistrust.

Stepping into and filling this void has been religion with its restoring rituals of trust in the form of faith while offering the promise and protection from evil. Religion has been losing its power with people scurrying to find replacements for its spiritual calm in an increasingly secularized society dominated by material panic, as societal sanity moves towards insanity.

Erikson takes up this issue writing in “Young Man Luther” (1958):

“In that first relationship man learns something which most individuals who survive and remain sane can take for granted most of the time. Only psychiatrists, priests, and born philosophers know how sorely that something can be missed. I have called this early treasure ‘basic trust’: it is the first psychosocial trait and the fundament of all others. Basic trust in mutuality is that original ‘optimism,’ that assumption that ‘somebody is there,’ without which we cannot live. In situations in which such basic trust cannot develop in early infancy because of a defect in the child or in the maternal environment, children die mentally.”

Trust is a nutriment for the soul as well as the mind. Erikson sees no ideological system superior to religion to restore this sense of comfort of the Provider and Providence. Again like Schopenhauer, he sees Western and Eastern religions having different appeals. Erikson sees Buddhism closer to being the over-all parent and the child, all in one, but Judeo-Christian traditions being strictly the parent. Western religion concentrates on prayer and atonement while Eastern religions cultivate the art of deliberate self-loss with Zen Buddhism its most systematic form. Curiously, neither religious orientation has much room for the adult.

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Psychologist Carl Rogers who is best known for his book, “On Becoming A Person” (1961) made a radical breakthrough when he changed the focus of trust. Using his own interpretation of the trust/mistrust dichotomy, he developed client-centered therapy where the therapist facilitates the client’s healing of himself. This has grown into student-centered teaching, worker-centered management, customer-centered research, and so on.

In his book, “A Way of Being” (1980) he elaborates on the qualities he sees in persons of tomorrow. Since these are consistent with my own, I’ve updated them to our time:

(1) They are open to the world, open to experience, to new ways of seeing, new ways of being, to new ideas and concepts. They are comfortable Confident Thinking, or thinking outside the box.

(2) They have a desire for authenticity. They are confrontational and tell it like it is. They don’t resort to double talk, hyperbole, hypocrisy, and deceit or punish others with what they know and who they are.

(3) They are skeptical of science and technology, and don’t swallow the unbridled hype without weighing its merits and relevance to them and their lives. They know that science is the new dogma and technology its new priesthood. They recognize the subtle inquisition that is used to control and conquer those who have heretical thoughts counter to this cultural tsunami. They would prefer science and technology show some restrain given the possible consequences of runaway technological growth.

(4) They are tired of being compartmentalized, fractured and fragmented into minute tasks so that they are expandable and replaceable without any loss of momentum to the system. They want to remind society, “They are the system!” Those days of keeping them in the dark and driving them like cattle are over. They want the big picture, the whole enchilada. They don’t want their mind separated from their body separated from their soul. Nor do they want life separated from thought, feeling, experience and meaning. They want to be treated as grown ups and trusted to have their act together because they are trustworthy.

(5) They wish for intimacy not licentious and meaningless pairings, but the closeness and intimacy of shared purpose. Life for them is love made visible which demands intimacy, accountability, involvement and commitment. No half measures for them.

(6) They accept the change process and they want it known they are prepared to take risks and face the challenges and opportunities of change.

(7) They are caring persons and want to help others in very real ways. That said they are suspicious of professional helpers who are in it for the making and the taking. They want to make a nonmoralistic and nonjudgmental difference.

(8) They are aware that they live on a dying planet and that they are its murderers and want to reverse this by being ecologically responsible not in the grand sense but in the simple sense by picking up their own trash, not using plastic, reducing their use of fossil fuels, and in other little ways that bring little attention to them, but make an amazing impact on their environment.

(9) They are anti-institutional and are tired of the factory mentality of our “Machine Age” thinking infrastructure that is highly structured, fixed, inflexible, bureaucratic and wasteful of human energy and potential as well of diminishing natural resources. They believe it is high time that institutions exist for people and not people for institutions.

(10) An authority from within drives them. They trust their own experiences and have a profound distrust of external authority, the more so because it has a law for the wealthy and a law for the poor, a law for minorities and a law for the majority. They make their own moral judgments, and even openly and defiantly will disobey laws they consider unjust.

(11) They have had material things substituted for love, and have been treated as a commodity not only by their parents but also by their teachers and preachers, and society in general. They are now fundamentally indifferent to material comforts and rewards. Money and material status symbols are not their goals. They can live with affluence, but it is in no way necessary to them.

(12) They have a yearning for spiritual fulfillment these persons of tomorrow. They have seen their parents chase the buck, seen the stock market ascend to great heights and crash, watched the culture of society go into a frenetic spin dominated by talk of bail-outs and recessions, foreclosures, and bankruptcies, while lost in the hype are their heroes who transcend the times such as Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Teilhard de Chardin.

If you doubt the relevance of this list, talk to a teenager today. The palliative, trust, is the best foil against pessimism as this diverse group of observers have discovered over time. It is not these observers, however, that change directions of a culture, but the young people as they take hold and make the future theirs. Optimism is never bad or wrong but it is based on “something,” while trust is based in “someone.” Persons as the trust barriers are the palliatives. Trust and confidence are the two sides of the same coin, inseparable and irrevocably connected to the same experience. It is now in the hands of persons of tomorrow.

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