ATTENTION BLOGGERS! WHAT HAS BEEN YOUR EXPERIENCE?

Currently, I have 384 separate missives posted on my blogger. More than 50 percent of them have been published in some other form elsewhere.

I should tell readers that "yes" there are errors or typos in many of these missives when I send them out to my email address list. Frequently, I massage or correct them after-the-fact such as the latest one saying "shuffle" instead of earlier version of "shovel." I write these rather hastily and mean to create the essence of my thought as if I am speaking to a person. It is a conversational style relying heavily on my memory

My interest in reporting this to you, however, is I've noticed information on my blogger that I can make connection with other bloggers. I don't know what this means. I would like to get my ideas out to a larger audience, but I do not have the time, the temperament or the inclination to do blogging back and forth. My fear is that if I make such connections I will be inundated with exponentially more blog responses.

One of the frustrations of an idea guy is that caring people often respond by recommending this or that book, this or that article, or bluntly asking me to purchase this or that product, without making a single comment on the content or context of what I have said, or the value or lack of value it has had to them.

One of my main criticisms of professors when I was in graduate school was that they couldn't write a simple declarative sentence without having ten references to what someone else had said or written to confirm and corroborate the legitimacy of what they were attempting to say. Consequently, I often didn't have the foggiest notion what they themselves thought. I try to avoid that methodology with no claim to authority other than my own point of view. I pride myself as a free thinker and encourage others to be so as well. Consequently, there are no sacred cows that I will avoid. None!

My question, then, for those who are more blog literate than I am, what has been your experience, and did you get appreciable benefit by extending your blog connections?

Let me know if you can spare the time.

Be always well,
JRF

DEFINE SOCIAL JUSTICE!

DEFINE SOCIAL JUSTICE!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 29, 2009

“Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others.”

John Rawls (1921 – 2002), Political philosopher

REFERENCE:

In my recent missive (April 28, 2009) titled “The More Things Change The More They Remain The Same,” I ended it with this statement:

“Notice all the characteristics of obsessive-compulsive behavior I alluded to earlier. This is the minefield we are in now. What is on the other side? I don’t know and am unlikely to be there when people such as you get there. It sounds melodramatic but I believe it true. We have finally become a single human race and social justice is not a dream or an ideal, but a necessity for our survival as human beings.”


A WRITER WRITES:

Dr. Fisher,

Define social justice if you can.

E

*    *     *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Lance Morrow wrote the featured article in Time (January 11, 1988) titled “1968: The year that shaped a generation,” with this lead in:

“1968 (was) like a knife blade, the year severed past from future.”

Sociologist Mary Gordon called the decade of the 1960s the “Age of Innocents” and “The Cult of the Child." She wrote:

“What a society thinks and feels about its children is an index of its attitudes about a great number of things: knowledge, power, sex, the future. Childhood begins in helplessness and ends in independence. Or at least that is what we moderns think. One of the signs that mark us as radically unlike our forebears is our perception of childhood as a distinct entity, a state of being not simply leading into another, later state (adulthood) but qualitatively different from it."

Those of us born a generation or more before that period know that children who were not of the upper classes were relegated to being “young adults” practically from birth.

We could drink ourselves into oblivion and ignore the status quo, or accept it and behave. The school and church kept us behaving and believing, but it became clear by 1968 that the school and church no longer believed in their roles.

World War II changed the rectitude of my generation. It put our mother’s in factories; our fathers off to war, and the moral integrity of society that kept a chastity belt around our minds became loosened but it did not fall off.

Many of us pursued knowledge because we had the freedom and privilege to do so. Society had shrunk in size during the Great Depression not only economically but also demographically. There were less of us to mind the company store and run society. So, those that pursued knowledge reaped the benefits, far greater than generations before.

The irony is that when the family, school and church paid attention to molding us into little adults, it stuck. We were never really children. We were little adults with a moral center. We had an internal monitor that limited the ways we might misbehave.

We possessed a bias that we were a chosen people and could magnanimously bless the rest of the world by telling it how to live and behave.

Few of us are in financial trouble today because we never had much and the little we had we saved for a rainy day. We were an underclass and didn’t know it until we graduated from our state universities.  Then we learned that brains often didn’t matter as much as the pedigree of the institution from which we graduated.   .

We were adults because we were never children. We were workers placed in a factory society with a factory mentality, a factory orientation, and a factory culture.

We were of the radio age, the reading of books age, the age in which entertainment was not provided but created largely by us.  We were the age that had respect for the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, for our parents, priests, teachers, and other authority figures. To this day, I cannot call my doctor by his given name.

We accepted ten or twelve levels of management when we entered our professions, middle managers who did nothing but shuffle papers to “in” and “out” baskets, and who devised a system of what was called “standards of performance” and “performance appraisal.”  We worked in obese organizations long before obesity became a common personal problem.

Teachers and doctors and dentists and engineers of our era were cut from our underclass and behaved pretty much as we did. The quality of teaching was excellent despite the low pay and long hours. These professions seldom complained, or equally amazing, never considered themselves to being used or exploited.

We as a generation had the experience of military service, which kicked us into shape and took the starch out of us if it needed taking. We gave up two to six years of our lives to the military, two years active duty and four years in the active reserve subject to recall to active duty. We accepted because it was the law of the land. But it was also an extension of the way we were programmed, which was to be loyal and to accept sacrifice. None of us would ever have thought of burning our draft cards or avoiding the draft, much as we might not be looking forward to military duty. We were programmed to “duty.”

We devoured newspapers, magazines and dime store novels. We liked picture shows that had no message other than to entertain. We got enough of that at church. We were not prepared for 1968.  As parents in that timeframe, we lost our children, failing to realize we never gave them a moral compass, as our parents had given one to us.

* * *

At the end of the 1960’s, we were in the first real television age, a medium that people of my generation still could not quite fathom Elvis Presley, the Beatles, or the Rolling Stones

The playfulness of the 1960’s led to the hippie movement and a full-fledged abdication of everything adult. Hugh Hefner removed the chastity belt.  His success was an alternative to the pent-up angst of war (WWII) on war (Korea) on more war (Vietnam). He provided a voyeuristic escape into hedonistic self-indulgence without society’s inclination to grasp the significance.  Pornography, which followed, was an answer to love being locked out of normal behavior. The 1960’s generation had no intention of growing up, and equated the biological libido with love

Gordon writes:

“As the prosperity of the sixties gave way to the belt tightening of the seventies, and the fast-track eighties moved into the austere nineties, we as a society grew increasingly incoherent about our ideas of childhood. A society’s notions of the relationship between pleasure and responsibility depend upon how rich it feels.

“Innocence is expensive, and we no longer know what we can afford, or for how long. We can’t decide whether we want our kids to get cracking on math scores so they can keep up with their Japanese age-mates or just to relax and play ‘like children’ as if we knew what that meant. What is more difficult, we are no longer sure whether our children are innocent or not.”

We have had all the freedom and the social justice anyone could ever imagine and this is what we have made of it. We have no leadership, no temperance, no frugality, but we do have is leaderless leadership, corruption, scandal, and an economy trying to correct itself without learning much about why it went wrong.

I have lived in a democratic society with the rule of law and the privileges afforded one of my circumstances. I do not confuse privileges with rights. I have taken advantage of my privileges with the freedom to be all that I could be.  

That said an individual should have: 

(1) An opportunity to receive an education,

(2) An opportunity to compete for a job,

(3) An opportunity to earn a living wage,

(4) The right to freedom of choice,

(5) The right to live wherever he pleases,

(6) The right to public health with potable drinking water and public sanitation,

(7) The right to purchase safe food and suitable housing,

(8) The right to practice the religion he chooses,

(9) The right to partner with whom he wishes.

Social justice can be reduced to human rights.

Freedom and social justice are a single fabric, not separate determinants. There cannot be freedom without justice, or justice without freedom. A French mathematician once said:

“Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.”

I see freedom and social justice in that same light.

Be always well,

Jim

*     *     *



THE MORE THINGS CHANGE THE MORE THEY REMAIN THE SAME

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE THE MORE THEY REMAIN THE SAME

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© April 28, 2009

“If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear and hope will forward it; and they who persist in opposing this mighty current will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men. They will not be so much resolute and firm as perverse and obstinate.”

Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797), English statesman

* * *

A WRITER WRITES:

Jim,

I have to admit that in-depth talk of financial instruments gets my head spinning, IQ be damned. Are you familiar with the concept of Capitalism 2.0? (I forget if we've discussed it.) I wish I'd come up with the idea myself.

Ironically, this movement called 2.0 is really a call for people to follow Adam Smith's much better rounded, more generous and enlightened idea of Capitalism.
I've read where you disparage my favorite economic system lately, and you're certainly not the only one.

But what you really - and rightfully! - Have gripes with is Primitive Capitalism (my term this time), the 1.0 version perfected by the Robber Barons and still alive and kicking, if wounded, on Wall Street today.

T

* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

New York columnist David Brooks makes a lot of sense to me. He is an Edmund Burke fan as you are an Adam Smith. I am no expert in the field of political and economic thought but am not embarrassed to have a point of view. Consequently, I can take from those with whom I can relate and develop my own ideas from that vantage point, encouraging others to do so as well.

My view is that there are very few enlightening or original ideas and so we tread on the political and economic philosophies of those of our past. My wonder is why that is so, why so preoccupied with science and technology when people in much more primitive circumstances provide us with the lighthouse of our ways, and without it we would be stumbling in the dark.

You say, “You wished you had thought of capitalism 2.0,” when Japan, Inc. was practicing it in the 1960s and 1970s, and abandoned it for old time capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s and then the bubble burst.

In SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998), I broke down obsessive-compulsive behavior into (1) cultural, (2) psychological, (3) corporate, (4) political, and (5) economic. I did so because I saw how an organization could go from start-up to mild success, where everyone counts, to stratification, in fighting, to delusions of grandeur and invincibility to economic collapse.

It has happened several times on a grand scale with booms and busts across the world, and, always, with the soul searching after-the-fact, acting as if out of the mist new ideas miraculously appear, and society moves on.

One of the tragedies that I have observed over and over again is the fact that societies are so self-estranged that they fail to understand what they are doing when they “buy into” ideas of another culture at the expense of their own. Take Japan, Inc.

To wit, in SIX SILENT KILLERS, I wrote:

“There is a saying that the Japanese are obsessed with people and realize profits. Americans are obsessed with profits and realize people problems. This is not necessarily true, but it is commonly thought. It is reputed that the Japanese understand and play the business game far better than its inventor, the United States. History is kinder to these commonly accepted remarks than one might like to admit.

“Alfred Sloan, the legendary leader of General Motors, once boasted that GM, although forced to lay off tens of thousands of workers during the Great Depression, continued to pay stockholders dividends.

“A Japanese industrialist, even if circumstances dictated such action, would never think to say, much less boast of such a deed. Openly valuing profits above people would destroy his relationship with his workers and produce chaos.

“What is remarkable about the Japanese executive’s confession is that Sloan’s boast has the same impact on American workers and with a similar long range effect. It is not limited to a company or a country because it plays the same way worldwide:

(1) Focus on workers, and they will focus on the needs of the company;

(2) Form a partnership with workers, and they will work to sustain that partnership;

(3) Practice what you preach and workers will preach what you practice.

“There is no great mystery here. Workers can be channeled to do good or imploded to do great damage.” (pp. 124 – 125)

* * *

Yes, I am aware of capitalism 2.0, as Bill Gates has defined it in terms of “Creative Capitalism,” where corporations sacrifice profits to the public welfare.


Perhaps this could be incorporated into The Fisher Paradigm © ™ which looks at organizational development in terms of intellectual capital and the power of people, that is, as a single entity.

A company, community and country are composed of an organization "personality profile," "demographic profile," and "geographic profile."

The idea here is that an organization is an organism as much as a collection of individuals. When a company-community-country loses its identity (personality), no longer is aware or accepting of what it is demographics), and denies its cultural baggage (geography), it flounders with the same consistency as the individual does.

Edmund Burke, who was an institutional man as is David Brooks, viewed property in terms of human and societal development, but he also believed in the institution of the monarchy and a hierarchical structure to society.

Japan in the 1960s and 1970s was not unlike what I saw here with start up companies having mild success, where everyone counted. Japan resisted the stratification never becoming top heavy with management, and even kept the political infighting under control, but not the delusions of grandeur.

Japan, Inc. forgot its limits, forgot it was a group oriented culture and not an individualistic society, forgot that 80 percent of Japanese industry was “mom & pop” and depended small business friendly tax and incentive base, and not skewed towards the Toyota and Nissan mega corporations.

In fact, in 1989, before the bust, two Japanese executives, Morita Akio and Ishihara Shintaro, feeling their oats and independence of the United States, wrote a book titled, “The Japan That Can Say ‘No’: The Card for a New US-Japan Relationship” (1989).

I read the book and the content was even more disparaging of the US than the title. The authors saw the pendulum of economic world power swinging from the United States to South East Asia. With the rise of India and China, they may have been a bit premature. On the other hand, India and China seem to be repeating the same sins of profits and markets before people.

* * *

Most of us would agree that knowledge is not wisdom, but how many of us would agree that people are more important than profits? Moreover, how many of would question the wisdom of progress? How many stockholders would sacrifice 10 percent of a dividend to house the homeless, feed the poor, educate the ignorant?

More than you might imagine I would think. Stockholders have never been asked that to my knowledge, at least recently.

The greater problem is not greed. I don’t happen to believe most people are greedy.

The greater good is sharing when you have little to share. I’m not impressed with Bill Gates. I studied the man and he was as ruthless early in his career as the Robber Barons. It is easy to be magnanimous when you are not needy yourself. The great wealth creators in our country as in many others, if not all, have had much in common with criminals on their way to economic empires.

We put a high value on “out smarting” the other guy. We call it “finessing” him. We have a whole litany of euphemisms for success when the brutal reality is less glamorous.

Would Detroit have benefited from capitalism 2.0? I don’t think so. I spent a lot of my youth in Detroit during my summer vacations, knew Detroit automotive executives, and UAW autoworkers as well. It was to my mind an industry that obsessively contemplated its own navel enamored of its own sensual obsession with "bigness" and "boldness" in matters automotive, and the world be damned!

Then, too, although never being interested in automobiles, per se, I read a lot about the bicycle mechanic Henry Ford, who incidentally practiced capitalism 2.0 early on but with a pragmatic goal – to make his workers able to buy his Model A and Model T Ford.

Read about Ford. He was a contrary sort and a bigot, but he paid $5 a day when the going rate was $1 a day, created a retirement and profit sharing plan, in fact, in 1916, he wanted to share the dividends with the community, but was defeated in the court by shareholders who preferred he simply issue dividends, and let the community fend for itself.

Finally, I don’t disparage your capitalistic system. It has had a good run, but my question is: does it bring out the more admirable qualities in man? Does any economic system? Certainly, Soviet communism didn’t.

Notice all the characteristics of obsessive-compulsive behavior I alluded to earlier. That is the minefield that we are in now. What is on the other side? I don’t know and am unlikely to be there when people such as you get there. It sounds melodramatic but I believe it true. We have finally become a single human race and social justice is not a dream or an ideal, but a necessity for our survival of human beings.

Be always well,

Jim

* * *

LOVE & LOYALTY: WHO IS THE FINAL ARBITER?

LOVE & LOYALTY: WHO IS THE FINAL ARBITER?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 28, 2009

“No disguise can long conceal love where it is, nor feign it where it is not.”

Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1630 – 1680), French courtier and moralist

“Among the faithless, faithful only he: among the innumerable false, unmoved, unshaken, unseduced, unterrified, his loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal.”

John Milton (1608 – 1674), Paradise Lost

* * *

Some years ago, my mother and sister had quite a spat. Both were very controlling personalities with little give in their respective gives. My mother chose to treat my sister as still a dependent although my sister was quite independent and successful in her own right. My mother also chose to see her daughter as a possession because she was her birth mother and that gave her rights in perpetuity that were irrevocable. Her daughter was allowed to be an individual and private person only on terms that were comfortable for her, the mother.

Unfortunately, my sister could see through my mother’s schemes and self-deceptions. She not only refused to play along with them, but also would remind my mother that she had been found out, which to my mother’s mind was tantamount to betrayal.

My sister saw it differently. And so the war between the two fine ladies grew more intense through the years, but now, for some reason, it had reached the point beyond which there was no return. It made little difference that my sister was a mother and grandmother. The little give they once shared was now totally gone.

At this point, my mother knowing I was devoted to them both, got me on the horn, and said, “Jimmy, I’m at my wits in with your sister.”

She then went into a well-rehearsed litany of crimes and misdemeanors my sister had committed against her with dates, times and the quality of the aggravation. At the end of this diatribe, she said simply, “You have a choice to make my son (something she never called me always calling me Jimmy), either you choose to love me only, and reject your sister, or I’ll never speak to you again.”

Although used to being an arbiter in these forays, as the histrionics were quite predictable, it was obvious my mother had gone beyond “no man’s land” into another dimension of hostility.

“Do you know what you are asking of me mother?”

“I know exactly what I’m asking of you. You have a choice to make. You can no longer hide behind all your learning and big words and expect to get out of this with sweet talk. Fish or cut bait!”

She had never fished in her life nor had I so that came – while we are in metaphor – from left field.

“Mother, that is exactly the point. I have a choice to make as to whom I love and to whom I am loyal. No other person on God’s green earth has the right to make that choice for me. I belong to no one, mother, not to you, not to my wife, not to my children, not to my friends, not to my employers…”

“Will you stop it? I get the point! So who do you choose, your mother or your sister?”

“Mother, sometimes you can be quite exasperating.”

“I told you, no big words, who do you choose?”

“Mother I am not your possession. I’ve never been your possession. I choose who to love and who to be loyal to, not you.”

“If you say so,” she came back just as defiantly, “so quit stalling, whom do you choose?”

“Well, mother, I choose to love and honor you as long as I live, and I choose to love and honor my sister as long as I live. I am loyal to you and I am loyal to my sister, and nothing on earth will ever change that.”

My mother hung up on me, but called back the next day from Iowa to where I was living at the time, Louisville, Kentucky, as if nothing had happened the day before.

* * *

THE PURITAN'S GIFT -- A RESPONSE TO A MISSIVE

THE PURITAN’S GIFT – A RESPONSE TO A MISSIVE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 27, 2009

“Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.”

Shakespeare

REFERENCE:

This cryptic response is to my answer to another’s question: Was Protestantism A Good or Bad Thing? (April 24, 2009)

A WRITER WRITES:

The Puritan Gift: Triumph, Collapse and Revival of an American Dream: Ken Hopper, Will Hopper: is a pretty big hit just now. A romantic view of the reformation, Puritanism and capitalism without an analysis of how it has also led to our degrading our environment.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

You couldn’t provide a better foil to my argument than the Hopper brothers’ new book. You are correct they fail to look at the moral consequences to our culture, and instead examine it from the perspective of the Protestant work ethic, where it came from, and how it in turn proved the dominance of America.

I should alert the reader it is a management book, and quotes W. Edwards Deming no less as its quintessential guru. The Hopper brothers argue, and I think correctly, the energy, social mobility, competitiveness and capacity for innovation, all of which lie at the heart of the American culture, have their origins in the discipline and the Calvinistic spirit of America’s first European immigrants, the Puritans.

My problem, and I can tell by the absence of responses, is that we don’t like to think that as great as this culture has been in one sense, it could possibly lead to our downfall in the broader sense.

Progress is a romantic concept in our culture, whereas I see it increasingly in the pejorative sense. I am an idea guy, and nothing under the sun is sacred or beyond my purview.

That said I believe this book will reassure many because it confirms their bias.

* * *

Today, the Charlie Rose show on PBS had a panel of reporters (2), hedge fund manager (1), and the 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics discussing the current economic crisis. It was followed by an interview with Lionel Barber, managing editor of the London Financial Times.

I mention this because both the Hoppers’ book, and the sentiment it projects, and my view are on an apparent collision course. This is also true of these most civil pundits.

The hedge fund manager, who used metaphor to illustrate his point, was most understandable. He talked about holding companies being shell companies and banks being where the money is.

Imagine a bridge between them has a capacity to handle only 10,000 pounds crossing it, and a truck of that capacity attempts to cross and goes down with scores of people with it. That is the current situation.

What he sees the government trying to do with its tarp funds and stress tests is to build another bridge with a slightly greater capacity to withstand the traffic or 10,000+ pounds when he thinks it should build a bridge of 40,000 pounds doing all the things that would require.

He then went into an explanation of bondholder debt to assets, claiming that for every dollar of debt written as an asset it doubles the value. So that $50billion of debt converted to assets would represent a net change of $100billion.

The panel all agreed that this was possible, but with one glitch. The bondholders would resist preferring to have the bailout money from the government, letting the taxpayer carry the burden then to devalue their bonds.

Bondholders, the entire panel agreed, are a powerful political lobby in Washington, and essentially dictate the current government policy.

The sentiments of the Hopper brothers I would imagine favor the bondholders. I do not. Just as I think capitalism, or the dominance of the Christian Judaic culture as we know it, is doomed for radical correction.

What do I know? Well, that is the beauty of ideas. You can take them or leave them.

Be Always well,

Jim

CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP & DISSONANT WORKERS (2000) -- FORWARD TO THE BOOK

CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP & DISSONANT WORKERS (2000)


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 30, 2000
This essay © April 26, 2009

Reference: This is the forward to this book published in 2000. It is offered here, exactly as it appeared, to give you my readers a sense of why this book is now flying off the shelves.


FORWARD TO CORPORATE SIN (2000)


“In a society without a moral compass, we easily become addicted to affluence and obsessed with irrelevance.”

James R. Fisher, Jr.

“As soon as you are born you are old enough to die.”

Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976), German philosopher

* * *


LEADERLESS LEADERSHIP

More books are written on leadership than any other subject with the possible exception of mystery novels and romances. The symbols of leadership are everywhere while leadership is practices nowhere. It doesn’t take a genius to downsize, merge, reengineer, streamline, or whatever else you want to call the mania of the moment.

Obsession is everywhere, but especially in corporate HYPE (Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elitism) is the order of the day, but it has little to do with either leadership or followership. HYPE inculcates context into a winning style with a nod to content. HYPE sounds good so it must be good! HYPE professors write books on the “competitive edge” after the competitive advantage is lost, but no one seems to mind. The university community is as much a good ole boy and good ole girl network as the corporate world.

Where is leadership in the media? Several anxious moments followed once the O. J. Simpson soap opera came to an inconclusive end, only to be refilled with the gonadal ambiguities of a sitting president, which set the stage for the grandest of soap operas, the Impeachment Trial of the President of the United States, only to be followed by the ludicrous custody battle over the six-year-old Cuban refugee Elian Gonzalez, and the beat goes on. The media doesn’t seem able to get above the story line of a Harlequin Romance.

Where is the leadership in the church? There is not a church in existence that is not constantly fighting scandals. The church experiences all the excesses of corporations because it is saddled with the same megalomania being more interested in protecting its image than dealing honestly with its challenges, more in the practice of deceit than truth-telling.

Where is leadership in science and technology? Does anyone in science wonder about the consequences of its discoveries? And if it does, what do scientists do about it? Do the technologists who turn science into toys of distraction register concern about the impact of these on society? One day in this 21st century 12 billion souls will be walking on this planet. That is double the world’s population today. We have long passed the stage of a sane world. What will it be like then? Does anyone know? Does anyone care?

Leaderless leadership is skewed to special interests. Here pragmatics take precedence over passions. Thus we have a dichotomy between those who do because of a passionate point of view, and those who governed by polls. Leaderless leaders are vulnerable because they can be bought or frightened into action. They have no moral center, no moral compass, and they cannot find their way. This is the essence of corporate sin.

KILLING THE SPIRIT

Something is missing in work. Everyone knows it. It is not the pay. It isn’t the working conditions. It isn’t the management. Management, as we know it, is quietly disappearing. So what is it? The spirit is being driven out of work. Work is no longer fun. Work is no longer good for the soul, no longer “love made visible” as Kahlil Gibran suggests.

Not only has work become more mechanical. It has become more nonsensical. Most work is the non-doing of non-thing things, or make-work. Work is no longer mainly by the sweat of the brow, but the merry dance of the little gray cells. To exercise these little gray cells, work needs to be treated as creatively as play. Otherwise, work leads to stress, burnout, and ultimately, moral and physical collapse.

Even the ethics of work have changed. What once was considered work, working hard and being loyal like good little Boy and Girl Scouts, is now obsolete. Working smart is the order of the day. Compliance is not enough. The command and control dictates of management are dinosaurs, no longer sufficient to meet the changing and accelerating demands of the marketplace. In fact this management practice gets in the way of productive work.

Even if it takes more brains than brawn, there still is a problem. Work has lost its poetry. Work is like a dime store novel. It has gotten a bad name. Companies, as incredible as it may seem, are making the workplace more like a playground for kids. Adults have been shrunken to the emotional equivalent of adolescence and fixated there. As a consequence, workers have gravitated to “learned helplessness and nonresponsibility.” Most workers are suspended in terminal adolescence whining about how bad they have it, when they’ve never had it so good. They berate their bosses and the company with a “woe-is-me” helplessness while they’re too self-indulgent to realize they have the power.

There is a good chance you’re one of these dissonant workers. If so, you’re likely to be suffering from one addiction or another to cover your numbing frustration. Meanwhile, the economic landscape is painted with optimism. “Can’t be anything wrong,” you say, “look at the Gross Domestic Product! The United States is going great guns, right?” If this is so, why don’t you have a happy face?

Obviously, the present economic climate is impressive. So what? Inside the figures tells another story. Pareto still reigns supreme. It is very likely that 80 percent of your effectiveness comes from 20 percent of your effort. Put another way, 80 percent of the productive work in your workplace is probably accomplished by 20 percent of the workers. It doesn’t stop there.

The way you work, and your attitude towards what you do spills over into what you are, and how you behave in society. You are not a separate entity from your work. You are your work. Chances are you don’t know what to do with yourself when you’re not working, so you fill the void with white noise.

UNCONSCIOUS INCOMPETENCE

Do you have too much time on your hands? If so, your life revolves around nonsense that is called “normal,” making you an unhappy camper. In a word, you’ve lost your moral compass, too. When you’ve lost your place and can’t find your space, you are apt to blame it on everything but the cause. It is your culture conditioning. You have been molded into the helpless toad you are, dependent on forces outside yourself, and you’re probably not aware of it.

Yet you are your culture, and your culture is serving you poorly.

What is your culture? Good question. Culture is everything that bombards your senses from the time you wake until you go to sleep, day in and day out. It’s your collective values, or your collective unconscious. It dictates the way you behave without thinking.

Things function the way they are structured to perform. It is the structure of work, which defines the function of work, which creates the workplace culture, which in turn dictates behavior like a house of tumbling cards. Culture is the way you behave on automatic pilot. It is that silent hand that gently pushes you into action or inaction as if you were a robot.

Once the family provided this cultural mechanism, assisted by the church, but no longer. The family is lost. The church is confused. Together, they are as lost and confused as you are. Consequently, your culture has a migraine and is pushing you right into the arms of dissonance. You don’t agree? Good, go against the grain and prove me wrong. Don’t pull out a book and find comfort with some dead authors. Look to your own life. How much of your history can you see through those rose colored glasses?

Make up your mind to take control. Don’t wait for someone else to make it up for you. My hope is that you will prick your ambivalence. My aim is to force you to think. My ambition is for you to take a stand as an owner, not a renter.

You have been programmed to believe what is best for you. This robs you of your own point of view. Life is short and can be sweet. It is well to remember this. Life gives no guarantees. Few will remember you when you’re gone. This is your show, your opportunity to “work with joy.”

What you think is likely to be second hand information, impressions from a popular press, television programming, your favorite pundit or guru, a charismatic politician, firebrand preacher, or any number of other impressionistic wizards. The irony is that your saviors are as lost as you are. Listen to yourself. Do you sound like them? Have you been too busy to think, wonder, and take control of your life?

Nobody knows for sure. That’s the key. Certainty has been lost to doubt. Nothing is taken at face value. The paradox is the more educated you are the less certain. That is why intellectual arrogance is so pervasive. Intellectuals need an audience to reassure themselves. They want to define you without an iota of thought on your part. Knowledge has become the greatest trap of personal enslavement. Don’t ever confuse knowledge with wisdom.

Do you challenge this? When someone puts you on the defensive, do you hide behind a knowledge barrier, or do you play a racial or religious card? If you don’t, you are the exception.

Insincerity has ruled too long. Deceitful behavior is endemic to everything. My beat is the corporation and therefore it is my focus. But insincerity extends from corporations to communities, from sacred institutions to profane associations. The dissonance of workers and leaderless leadership of managers reflect the times. My sense is that you have had enough of the gamesmanship, that it is time to go against the grain and look at the dissonance of work and deal with it. If you feel the same way, welcome aboard! You are about to ride the Fisher express.

Please leave your toys behind. This is a grow-up call. It is time to take responsibility and deal with it.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Tampa, Florida
November 30, 2000

WAS THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION A GOOD OR BAD THING?

WAS THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION A GOOD OR BAD THING?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 24, 2009

“Every living thing shall be meat for you. The fear of you and dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth into your hands they are delivered. Have dominion over the earth and subdue it.”

Genesis, The Bible

“Whatever definitions men have given of religion, I find none so accurately descriptive of it as this: that it is such a belief of the Bible as maintains a living influence on the heart and life.”

Richard Cecil (1743 – 1777), English clergyman

* * *

A WRITER WRITES:

Jim,

Your Luddite beliefs fly in the face of scientific research. I wish I had time this morning to address all of your points in that last missive (below). In reading it, I found myself agreeing passionately with you about half of the time, railing silently against you the other half - hey, at least you provoke thought, if not always agreement!

More on this later - I took your writing with me all day (in my mind) and chewed it over as I went about my day. Thank you for that.

One question, to clarify: do you think the Protestant Reformation, fueled by Guttenberg's printing press, was a bad thing? It wasn't clear.


* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

I decided to answer this in a separate offering. The Protestant Reformation has fascinated me for years, and I've written extensively on it. Recently, I wrote a piece on my blog (which I distributed to my E-mailing list) where I claimed Martin Luther confirmed the power of the individual against incredible odds, taking on Pope Leo X, and the mighty Roman Catholic Church.

WAS THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION A GOOD OR BAD THING?

I don't view historical events in the context of good or bad. It happened and proved, once again, that an individual stepping forth against all odds to show leadership in the face of catastrophe to save the church by exposing its corruption and evil.

Constantine did it in the fourth century when he ended persecution of Christians and adopted the faith, but I think that was more a strategic move rather than persuasion of the heart as was the case with Luther. Kings and emperors throughout history have used religion to justify their bellicose ways and quest for land and plunder. It gave Constantine a way to solidify his empire.

Constantine saved Christianity with his head, and you could say Luther saved it again with his heart. The question is moot whether either of these developments was good or bad. They were. Religion after Luther, however, was to become increasingly secular as Nietzsche declared. God wasn’t dead. God took on a materialistic form.

There were schisms in the church before Luther. There was the "Babylonian Captivity" of the Avignon Papacy, where a separate Catholic Church was set up in France. BB and I visited that site with all the popes in their splendid gowns pictured across the main hall.

The 14th and 15th century were writhe with schisms as precursors to Luther. Corruption in the Church remained unabated. Equally important, peasants were increasingly restless to unshackle themselves from their feudal lords and economic dependence on regional princes. The seeds of nationalism were being sowed.

The times were fertile for someone to step out of the shadows and say, "enough already!"

It had to be an individual, someone who was past the point of tolerance for things as they were -- remember Luther had gone to Rome and had seen church corruption up close and personal with the blatant selling of indulgences.

To foster real change it had to be someone who could give words and voice to society's collective frustration. In psychological terms of reaction formation, Luther overcame his anxiety, self-preservation, doubt, and the fear of the consequences of his actions to post his theses on the Wittenberg door of the "All Saints' Church" in Saxony.

It takes an accumulation of things to move a person off the dime, but it also takes that rare individual, indeed, who does so at great personal risk. Luther was a simple monk as Voltaire has said, but he was also a trained theologian.

Luther knew his religion, his church, and what it purported to believe and stand for. So, when he saw corruption of the church’s tenets of faith, he had the wherewithal to give voice to his protest with meaning that would touch and reverberate to the heartstrings of his people. In the process, he also departed from church doctrine to his theology of faith alone, cutting out the clergy and the Sacrament of Confession as intercessors to God.

Most of us, despite all, go along to get along. Passivity is not only endemic to our times but is a matter of human history.

I sat here in my study and imagined what that must have felt like for Luther to overcome his inertia. In a very minor way, I felt that way when I gave my October 30, 1984 speech against the corruption of ethics that participative management had become. I knew it was dangerous to give voice to my concerns, but I knew I had to do it. I remember how nervous I was; how uptight, how I stuttered when I talked to that crowd of executives, which I do when I am nervous, but I had to do it to live with myself.

Ratchet that up one hundred times or more and you have some idea of how Luther must have felt the day he finally posted his theses. He had reached the point where he didn't think whether it was a good thing or a bad thing to do, but something he had to do unless he might go mad.

The many biographies of Luther I have read often point out the matter of his emotional stability, but where would Protestantism be without his madness? Calvin and Zwingli, along with many others, were to follow in his dust, but they all had to have Luther as the pathfinder.

We have the perspective of 500 years, and there has been no man in the Christian church to rival him in all that time. It says something about the human community. Was that good or bad? For me, it simply was a confirmation of the power of individualism.

Gutenberg invented the printing press but it would have been for naught if Luther could not write. We sometimes forget what a beautiful writer he was, how he purified and gave eloquence to his native German. He lifted up an entire society of people who were anxious for someone to give meaning and weight to their anxiety and thereby bring about some resolution.

He translated the Bible into German and gave roots to the German people, which in turn gave a people identity, pride and provided the catalyst to German nationalism. Peoples across Europe translated the Bible into their respective languages and had similar outcomes.

THE AGGRESSIVENESS OF THE JUDAIC CHRISTIAN CULTURE

The more fundamental question, one which I write about in "NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND" (unpublished), is that James Burke and Robert Ornstein were on to something with their book, THE AXEMAKER’S GIFT: A DOUBLE-EDGED HISTORY OF HUMAN CULTURE (1995).

Burke and Ornstein are referring to the double-edged blade of human history in which we cut away “what was” for a new reality. Each time we do we attain something we desire at the expense of something we lose forever never to be retrieved.

My reference is more specific and that is to the aggressiveness of our Judaic Christian culture, which keeps cutting away with reckless abandon.

Voltaire claimed without Luther there would have been no America and no capitalism, both fundamental ideas of individualism, which I think are good. But even goodness gives up a great deal in its quest for goodness. We can, indeed, have too much of a good thing.

It happened with nomads becoming farmers, farmers becoming industrialists, industrialists becoming entrepreneurs establishing modernity and then post modernity. In each instance, something precious was given up for something new. It is called in modern parlance, "progress," but at what price? In my view, the price is the wreckage of the way "it was" to the way "it is," over and over again until there is little “is” left.

Western man in particular, that is, Christian man, never stops to consider change in terms of what is given up, never to be experienced again. He is instead mesmerized by what is gained until the costs confronting him are so excessive that they are unavoidable. We are at that point but yet he wavers.

Half the species once known to man are gone, many are in great jeopardy, while the coastal configuration of this small planet will obviously be much different 500 years from now due to global warming. In fact, where I live in Florida may not even exist above water in 500 years.

What has this to do with Luther? Well, I think everything.

Christianity and Judaism are aggressive faiths in terms of the planet -- read Genesis. Luther took Christianity out of its spiritual corruption and gave birth to secularism. We are currently plagued with a new iteration of secular corruption and its consequences.

We have given up one corruption for another, and the Church, whatever its claims to the contrary, is tainted with the same toxicity. The church is a human institution, which is sometimes forgotten, and catches the same cultural virus as other institutions. We suffer the paradoxical dilemma of having more tools than we need to rectify the situation but without the human will to activate them.

I have written extensively of non-thinking thinking, non-work work, non-doing doing, non-profession professions until blue in the face.

We can explore space and go to the moon, go to the depths of the ocean, decipher the great mysteries of our genome, but we can’t control the human heart.

Instead, we build complexity on complexity, and create ever more sophisticated inventions but bypass the most insolvable mystery of all, that of our human nature. We are primitives surrounded by a synthetic world of perfection. It would be blasphemy to suggest our Christian Judaic principles and our Bible as being a source of concern against the reality of nature and the limits of this planet.

THE ULTIMATE FRUITION OF THE REFORMATION, CAPITALISM

Capitalism would not have developed in the way that it has developed were it not for Luther and the subsequent theology of Calvin. That theology gave birth to the Protestant Work Ethic. Christianity, which rose out of the Old Testament, found the perfect vehicle for its cultural aggressiveness in capitalism, which I sense was the unintended consequences of Luther's doctrine. That gives me pause.

Erasmus, who was a more timid soul, more circumspect, stayed in the church and was one of the enablers of the Counterreformation while agreeing with much of what Luther espoused. We have a lot of Erasmus-types in our midst today, but no Luther.

My concern, and it is evident in all my writings, is that of the aggressiveness of our society, which is a Christian culture in the main, as if it would be insane to be content with stasis. Enough is never enough for us whether it is wealth, power, property, or influence. There must be more. We suffer from personal as well as societal hegemony. It is greed of the heart that seeks peace of the soul by filling it with ever more need.

That is why in my writings I attempt -- like an Erasmus I suppose -- to step outside the shadow of Christianity, and mainly my branch of it, Irish Roman Catholicism, not with apostasy, but with my renegade spirit attempting to describe how I see things (see my blog). You see there is certain ambivalence to my predicament because I have greatly benefited in a personal sense from the Protestant Reformation and the rise of individualism.

The cliché "timing is everything" is apropos to this discussion. The juxtaposition of the Gutenberg press, dissemination of knowledge, the corruption of the church, the bold and dramatic posting of Luther’s theses, and the thirst for ordinary men and women for liberation of their spirits as well as bodies from dependence on the church and their feudal lords was to become the world in which we now live.

Lately, I have been reading a lot about early Christianity from the works of many scholars. My interests are totally that of the curious as I have no credentials other than curiosity. But my sense is that there is an attempt of scholars to reconcile religion, per se, and Christianity specifically, with the mindset that would attempt to save the planet by destroying it.

That, in fact, is what we are doing. And I see apologists for this in superficial thinkers such as Thomas Friedman in that crowd. He is a journalist, not a scholar. Regrettably, I see many scientists with a similar superficiality when it comes to the greater question that I have crudely described here, that is, our aggressive culture. Incidentally, Einstein voiced a similar concern.

A spiritual animal we are as well as a material entity. There is no doubt. This is another reason why Luther is important. Our religion is important to us, as is our God because it gives meaning, direction, guidance, comfort, and peace to our immortal souls. Religion is as necessary for our souls as secular endeavors are necessary for our bodies. But religion has failed to provide temperance or a "brake" to our behavior.

No philosophy, I know of, has developed to put the brakes on our Christian theology of conquest and dominance that would make all plants and animals submissive to our will. That has backfired as the animal population declines or disappears, our forests become depleted, our streams polluted, the air we breathe toxic, and the soil from which we gain our sustenance becomes contaminated with chemical pesticides and fertilizers meant to enhance the yields. The gold of our times is water, which was always a delimited commodity, but now threatens to be the cause of wars.

We need a new page in the drama of human existence.

The Protestant Reformation, and the rise of individualism, which has epitomized American society, has run out of options and room as well as steam.

Luther put the individual in a direct relationship with his God, and that fact gave cause to pursue excellence and material success. That has come full circle. We have gotten all we can get out of a factory society with "progress our most important product."

We must embrace a new paradigm with natural aggressiveness taking a new form in our religion. Can capitalism survive that paradigm change? I don't know. I only know that economic aggressiveness, that India and China are now duplicating, society's with a third of the world's population, could create a level of spiritual and material corruption that would take more than 95 theses on a church door to change, and I’m not sure our planet could survive that challenge.

Be always well,

Jim.

IT ISN'T AMERICA'S STUDENT MATH AND READING SKILLS THAT ARE THE PROBLEM. IT IS THE FACTORY SOCIETY WE HAVE BECOME!

IT ISN’T AMERICA’S STUDENT MATH AND READING SKILLS THAT ARE THE PROBLEM. IT IS THE FACTORY SOCIETY WE HAVE BECOME!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 23, 2009

“As are families, so is society. If well ordered, well instructed, and well governed, they are the springs from which go forth the streams of national greatness, and prosperity, of civil order and public happiness.”

William Makepeace Thayer (1820 – 1898), American author

* * *

A WRITER WRITES:

The following article is from one of my all-time favorite authors and journalists, Thomas Friedman, author of "The World is Flat." For anyone even remotely interested in the quality of America's public schools, this is sobering.

Call me parochial in the scope of my interest ("Think globally, act locally"), but I hope the Collier County Public Schools in particular become one of those "islands" of excellence he mentions. We've got our work cut out for us.

I'd love to hear your thoughts - but more importantly, please share this with your friends if you find it of value.

* * *

OP-ED COLUMNIST THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

SWINNING WITHOUT A SUIT

Published: April 21, 2009

Speaking of financial crises and how they can expose weak companies and weak countries, Warren Buffett once famously quipped that “only when the tide goes out do you find out who is not wearing a bathing suit.” So true. But what’s really unnerving is that America appears to be one of those countries that has been swimming buck naked — in more ways than one.

Credit bubbles are like the tide. They can cover up a lot of rot. In our case, the excess consumer demand and jobs created by our credit and housing bubbles have masked not only our weaknesses in manufacturing and other economic fundamentals, but something worse: how far we have fallen behind in K-12 education and how much it is now costing us. That is the conclusion I drew from a new study by the consulting firm McKinsey, entitled “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools.”

Just a quick review: In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. dominated the world in K-12 education. We also dominated economically. In the 1970s and 1980s, we still had a lead, albeit smaller, in educating our population through secondary school, and America continued to lead the world economically, albeit with other big economies, like China, closing in. Today, we have fallen behind in both per capita high school graduates and their quality. Consequences to follow.

For instance, in the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment that measured the applied learning and problem-solving skills of 15-year-olds in 30 industrialized countries, the U.S. ranked 25th out of the 30 in math and 24th in science. That put our average youth on par with those from Portugal and the Slovak Republic, “rather than with students in countries that are more relevant competitors for service-sector and high-value jobs, like Canada, the Netherlands, Korea, and Australia,” McKinsey noted.

Actually, our fourth-graders compare well on such global tests with, say, Singapore. But our high school kids really lag, which means that “the longer American children are in school, the worse they perform compared to their international peers,” said McKinsey.

There are millions of kids who are in modern suburban schools “who don’t realize how far behind they are,” said Matt Miller, one of the authors.

It is not that we are failing across the board. There are huge numbers of exciting education innovations in America today — from new modes of teacher compensation to charter schools to school districts scattered around the country that are showing real improvements based on better methods, better principals and higher standards. The problem is that they are too scattered — leaving all kinds of achievement gaps between whites, African-Americans, Latinos and different income levels.

Using an economic model created for this study, McKinsey showed how much those gaps are costing us. Suppose, it noted, “that in the 15 years after the 1983 report ‘A Nation at Risk’ sounded the alarm about the ‘rising tide of mediocrity’ in American education,” the U.S. had lifted lagging student achievement to higher benchmarks of performance? What would have happened?

The answer, says McKinsey: If America had closed the international achievement gap between 1983 and 1998 and had raised its performance to the level of such nations as Finland and South Korea, United States G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $1.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion higher. If we had closed the racial achievement gap and black and Latino student performance had caught up with that of white students by 1998, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $310 billion and $525 billion higher. If the gap between low-income students and the rest had been narrowed, G.D.P. in 2008 would have been $400 billion to $670 billion higher.

There are some hopeful signs. President Obama recognizes that we urgently need to invest the money and energy to take those schools and best practices that are working from islands of excellence to a new national norm. But we need to do it with the sense of urgency and follow-through that the economic and moral stakes demand.
With Wall Street’s decline, though, many more educated and idealistic youth want to try teaching. Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, called the other day with these statistics about college graduates signing up to join her organization to teach in some of our neediest schools next year: “Our total applications are up 40 percent. Eleven percent of all Ivy League seniors applied, 16 percent of Yale’s senior class, 15 percent of Princeton’s, 25 percent of Spellman’s and 35 percent of the African-American seniors at Harvard. In 130 colleges, between 5 and 15 percent of the senior class applied.”

Part of it, said Kopp, is a lack of jobs elsewhere. But part of it is “students responding to the call that this is a problem our generation can solve.” May it be so, because today, educationally, we are not a nation at risk. We are a nation in decline, and our nakedness is really showing.

* * *


DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

I must confess at the outset that I am not a fan of Thomas Friedman. The world is not flat and technology has not made it so, but the world has caught up with and in some cases passed the United States as if it were standing still.

Technology, at this juncture, is mainly toys of distraction rather than tools of efficacy when it comes to electronics.

When used as tools, well, we have seen what damage it has done in a worldwide recession and a shrinking rather than an increasing world economy. Yes, I am saying the machinations of electronics have led to chaos and opportunity, and opportunity has led to chaos. Information technology and the Internet have been misused, but this is largely because we are in the dawn of this new age and should not ascribe fanciful claims.

It happened in the sixteenth century with the dissemination of the Bible and the Protestant Reformation, so it is not new. What is new is that we have an army of spin-doctors to put it all in a false light.

Journalists such as Friedman know how to hit the hot buttons, say the right things, elaborate with the right jingoisms for a society that seldom thinks at all much less very deeply.

American society wants clipped and understandable explanations for the brain drain without getting to the central issues that have orchestrated the problem. We love to expound on symptoms and direct our strategies to deal with them. Journalists are the new celebrities of that calling. To be fair, Friedman didn’t invent this process, but he is skilled in manipulating it to his purposes with a vulnerable public falling prey to his jingoistic analysis.

Friedman gives himself a way when he indicates he remains enamored of an anachronistic paradigm, the factory. He puts the whole problem of education for America’s decline in math and reading skills in terms of jobs and earnings: “They are being prepared for $12-an-hour jobs — not $40 to $50 an hour.”

You see, that is the problem. Education has become vocational training.

We have become lock, stock and barrel a factory society that treats education as a vocational conduit to well paying jobs to keep society’s factory operating at full tilt, which is not the function of education at all.

You need not take my word for it, but read Ivan Illich’s DESCHOOLING SOCIETY (1972) and TOOLS FOR CONVIVIALITY (1973), or Thomas Sowell’s INSIDE AMERICAN EDUCATION (1993), or Page Smith’s assessment of higher education in KILLING THE SPIRIT (1991) where they repeat this same charge.

Then there was Dr. Keith Hart, professor emeritus of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He was on a discussion panel recently on C-Span ruminating about our current economic chaos. The panel was clearly caught up in its own algorithms regarding economic multipliers and if the future held a zero or one or better forecast for such indices.

Economists discussing these mathematical abstractions have the hum of turbines in a power plant without the utility.

Professor Hart, who has a tendency to wave his hands like a humming bird desperate to stay in flight, said essentially that we have been in the business since WWII of creating synthetic jobs to fuel our synthetic economy which has in turn created a synthetic infrastructure to support a synthetic foundation. This has in turn taken us away from our values and therefore our concrete sensibilities.

Fifty years ago when I was in college that was already starting but it hadn’t yet reached the acceleration I experienced as a professor in the 1970s. That was the period when “management style” were the buzzwords, and former corporate executives were establishing MBA programs at Wharton, Harvard and MIT on the “case study” methodology in executive development. This was like a prairie fire across the country. No matter your discipline, everyone had to have an MBA.

We became a factory producing not tens of thousands but millions of MBAs with the precision of a Ford assembly line. I taught in these MBA programs from 1970 to 1980 for several universities as an adjunct professor. The MBA curriculum was one without imagination, creativity but with a uniformity and precision as if produced by a tool and die craftsman but without the same utility.

This was the army of the night (most were courses after work) that was setting the direction for the American ship of state. We have seen where it has taken us from Wall Street to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, from AIG to Bear Stearns, from Detroit auto to Pittsburgh steel, and beyond.

We have structured our society to take not give to get while the getting is good and then wonder why these lopsided educated people who run things have tried to walk off with the company store, run the company into the ground, merge and skim, or abort and fly to safety in their golden parachutes.

The Robber Barons were doing it in the nineteenth century, and many of them had the mistaken idea that by creating the Carnegie library system, Rockefeller Sloane-Kettering Institute, and the Mellon Institute, et al, that they had left enough culture to atone for all their sins of abuse of that pristine culture.

We talk about trickle down economics, but we don’t talk about trickle down culture.

Our culture has been starved of vibrancy, beauty, resilience, creativity, and essence because we have in the last hundred years not created a single Van Gogh, or one of his stature. This man in his madness and resistance to the church and state created out of an intrinsic need to express himself. It was his misfortune to live in another era of a dying culture. Create he did, and for it we are all blessed today. He never sold a single painting in his lifetime, yet his paintings today sell for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Alvin Toffler, who was thought to be an aberration, someone who came up with some ideas that could be quickly forgotten, described the society that the twentieth century created to satisfy first the Robber Barons, and their descendants, and then the army of automobile manufacturers and allied industries that followed.

As a boy, I vacationed in Detroit, where my uncle was a professor at the University of Detroit, and often was in the homes of automotive workers, homes that were upscale to my uncle’s home, and the homes of doctors and lawyers with whom he associated. None of these auto workers had gone to college, many had not finished high school, but their fathers and mothers, older brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts all worked for the “Big Three” automakers, and as Vance Packard was fond to say, were systematic waste makers.

They consumed and discarded as if the good times would never end. I seldom saw any books in these homes whereas I always saw them in homes of my uncle’s friends. I asked about this with the common response, “Who has time to read?” Indeed.

Toffler wrote in THE THIRD WAVE (1980) that industrialists in the early twentieth century found they needed employees who could read, write, and do simple math, and so they supported public education. These same industrialists said that they needed these educated workers to be obedient, compliant, polite, punctual, respectful of authority, controllable, and passive. Reading and writing and arithmetic were the explicit curriculum while the behavioral norms were the implicit curriculum. We are haunted by that legacy to this day.

This factory curriculum was in support of a factory output to minimize conflict, confrontation and communication with workers as persons. Frederick Winslow Taylor became an international educator and management consultant by treating people as things to be managed, manipulated, motivated and maneuvered, as the industrial needs required, while carefully conducting time studies to see that these workers performed at the ultimate level as if they were machines.

Now, why should it be a surprise that these workers would go home and would dominate their families and rear their children as if they were things to be seen and not heard, and to be obeyed without explanation, and to be punished arbitrarily because they could, and to be motivated by intimidation as they were motivated at work instead of with trust and love and understanding?

Nor why should we be surprised that our primary and secondary educational explicit and implicit curriculum should follow the same norm, or why should we think it was likely to be different at the university level?

I returned to the university in 1970 after graduating many years before, after working on four continents as an executive, and after reading extensively in many fields, including the one I was pursuing. My professors didn’t want to hear what I thought, what I had experienced, or how what they were teaching dovetailed or failed to dovetail with my empirical work. They wanted me to be submissive, passive, obedient to their authority, study for their tests, do their papers, and by all means attend every one of their lectures as if I were in the fourth grade.

I had one professor tell me,

“I understand you are a gifted writer, but I’m suggesting you drop my seminar, which you have attended infrequently (I was consulting on the side across the country to support a wife and four children) because if you write the best paper I’ve ever received I’m still going to give you the lowest failing grade I have ever given.”

“Not because of the quality of my work? Is that what you are saying?”

“Don’t be impertinent with me!” And with that,she walked away. I dropped the course.

For six years going to graduate school full time year around I ran into such walls frequently. But for the efforts of one professor, I never would have made it. I owe him more than I could ever repay him. In fact, I owe him my life.

You see, they tried to beat me down to the point that I didn’t want to live, to deny me the degree no matter how well I defended by thesis with my orals, or no matter how excellent my written thesis was.

This professor guided me through the final no man’s land of academia. I’ve often wondered how many others weren’t so lucky. Getting a Ph.D. is an endurance contest with a lot of chicken shit along the way. It is the reason fully 25 percent of Ph.D. candidates never receive their degrees, and are known as “ABD’s” – all but dissertation. A dissertation is a book and the committee evaluating that book is the same collection of professors wih whom one had been conducting open warfare.

You get much further in our adolescent factory society behaving rather than challenging.

Diana West is the author of a best selling book with the intimidating title to our factory society: THE DEATH OF THE GROWN-UP: HOW AMERICA’S ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT IS BRINGING DOWN WESTERN CIVILIZATION (2007). West is a columnist who has finally had enough. Those who read me will find she says many of the same things I have been saying for years. I am happy for her success. She doesn't skirt the issues, but zeroes in on them with punishing clarity.

That is why I insist writers such as Friedman are misleading the public by failing to acknowledge and then deal with the central issues derailing society, which are seeded in our collective passivity.

Collective passivity has been programmed into us because it has served the purposes of a factory society. We are no longer a factory society, but for all the tea in China you cannot wave a magic wand and dispense with that mindset. It is our culture, as we know it.

We have systematically and carefully orchestrated this mindset into our collective conscience while writers and economists want to tweak it at the edges and expect the core of our collective behavior to change. I wrote this in THE WORKER, ALONE! (1995):

“For the past quarter century, we have been bombarded with the idea of how to manage change. Change is of secondary importance. Change will come about naturally, over time, once we bring about change in ourselves. Order comes from within. To establish order takes more than good intentions, more than a change of attitude. Order requires a radical change in mentality, a structural change in the way we view the world. Order requires the individual going against the grain.”

There would be no interest in change if we were still the dominant force in the world. While Friedman talks the nonsense about the world being metaphorically flat and President Obama uses his magical oratory hoping to match it with the numbers of recovery, the American electorate suffers from learned helplessness, terminal adolescence and arrested development, the legacy of a factory mentality (see SIX SILENT KILLERS CRC Press 1998).

We behave as a society are inclined to prescriptions for solving our dilemmas without identifying the nature of our decline. Obviously, the United States scores in math and reading skills are low, but so are our skills in self-restraint and delayed gratification.

You don’t get to where you wish to go on hope, alone. You get there by getting off your ass and showing the courage to be what you could be. You don’t get there by obsessively comparing and competing, but by finding your own center. You get there with hard work not by taking short cuts. You get there by realizing it is not genius that creates opportunity but preparation that does.

My BB is business manager for a Jewish Day School, classes from pre-K through eighth grade. Many of the parents send their children to this school at great sacrifice. They don’t do it because they are rich. They do it because they care to give their children a solid cultural and intellectual education. They do it because they have stepped outside our collective passivity at a price.

When I was in college, I took a tough curriculum of science and mathematics, physics and chemistry, and the best students in those courses were invariably Jewish men and women. Likewise, I took many electives in the humanities because I like books and ideas. Again, Jewish students led the way, and often were my best teachers.

During Christmas vacations, while in college, I would go to the Clinton County Library (Clinton, Iowa) every day to study. My mother would ask me if I saw any of my friends there. I would always say the same thing. “My Jewish friends.” I mention this because when the home is not a factory, but a place of encouragement and discovery children will behave differently.

All the magical rhetoric, and metaphorical ideas (“swimming without a suit”) are meaningless if we don’t abandon the factory paradigm. It no longer fits the times or the needs of society. We live in a culture that never wants to grow old and so has little interest in growing up. We will know when we have turned the corner when plastic surgery becomes an obsolete profession and people prefer Mozart to “American Idol.”

* * *

JAMES, WHY NO BOOKS ON MARRIAGE?

WHY NO BOOKS ON MARRIAGE?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 22, 2009

“One of the good things that come of a true marriage is, that there is one face on which changes come without your seeing them; or rather there is one face which you can still see the same, through all the shadows which years have gathered upon it.”

George MacDonald (1884 – 1905), Scottish novelist

* * *


It is after four in the morning, and I am wide-awake and here at my computer writing of another wondrous dream.

In sleep earlier in the night I dreamed of a favorite cousin, the son of my favorite uncle whom I’ve written about in these pages, who died in 2005. In the dream he came to visit BB and me and we talked about things of our youth that BB knew nothing about, first because she wasn’t in my life, and secondly, because she was not yet born.

We talked about our summer trips to Higgins Lake in north central Michigan, where we played football in the lake, and argued baseball at lunch, and what Scarlet O’Hara looked like in “Gone With The Wind” with my Uncle Leonard as arbiter, who was a professor at the University of Detroit. He would intercede and quiet us down. Then one day he decided instead to discuss with us the great religions and philosophies of the world. It bored my cousin Robert to death, but it made an indelible impression on me that has lasted a lifetime.

We talked about playing baseball in Detroit with an organized team in the summer league for teenagers.

We talked about going to the State Fair, and crashing the gate, and then crashing the main show by crawling under the stage and taking front row seats in the Louis Armstrong and Eddie Fisher concert on stage.

We talked about going to Brigg Stadium and watching the Detroit Tigers play the New York Yankees seeing Joe DiMaggio and Yogi Berra.

We talked about the time a big Tiger-Yankee series was promising a sell out crowd. We saw a vacant lot near the stadium and ushered cars into the lot and collected a dollar a car and then spent it at the game.

We talked about walking the streets at night and throwing rocks at streetlights with my cousin and his buddies missing, and I hitting a light out on the first try, and then running like scared rabbits.

We talked about hanging out at a drive-in before there were drive-ins and having a triple decker sesame seed hot bun hamburger with a malted milk. This was before McDonald’s was on the scene.

We talked about my cousin telling a bunch of girls I was quarterback for the University of Detroit’s League Championship Team when I was only a sophomore in high school. My cousin a senior got the girl’s to believe him.

We talked about how he used me thereafter as bait to get girls and going to places where even he was under aged.

We talked about reading books and discussing them such as “Growth of a Man” by the Canadian author Mazo de la Roche. Thereafter, I read most of her Jalna series books at the Clinton County Library, Clinton, Iowa.

We talked about my cousin one time having to take Latin over in summer school at the University of Detroit Jesuit High, and my studying it with him, a subject that I loved, and he hated.

We talked about how much we loved each other like brothers instead of cousins.

In my dream, he remembered all these things and more, and I am saddened because he was gone. To soften my sadness, I said, “But at least you lived to be eighty." He looked at me suspiciously, and said, "I died barely 74." Timidly, I said, “I’m sorry.” He said, “It’s okay. You were never too great with chronology.” Then he said he had to be off, as I wondered how long before I would join him.

* * *

Then before I could turn around another person I loved came through the door. He said, “Am I too early?”

It is my former mentor, boss and friend, Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth, who died a few years before my cousin, but made it into the twenty-first century.

I am in my normal uniform of the day, sweat pants and sweats shirt, and tennis shoes, and BB is dressed about the same. She is reading a book, and I’m thinking about my cousin and his visit, forgetting that we were scheduled to have Francis stop by.

Like my cousin, he looked well. The curious thing is they both died early because of tumors in the brain. They both were highly successful men, both were first engineers and then went back to graduate school to earn terminal degrees, my cousin in economics – like his father, and Francis in education.

Robert had been in US Naval Intelligence when he was in the service and Francis had not been in the military. Francis went to the University of Iowa as did I but before me, and was from Illinois. Robert was from Michigan but took his electrical engineering degree from LSU in Louisiana. So, both were Midwesterners and both Roman Catholics, but Robert was indifferent to his Irish Catholicism while Francis was a Croatian Roman Catholic, and quietly devout.

Francis was not, however, in the same reminiscent mood. He wondered about the house, which is virtually wall-to-wall books in every room, picking out a book here and there, examining it and commenting on it.

“I see you have read Thomas Kempis.”

“Not as you’ve read him Francis, I'm sure.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, I read books. You live them. I know no man who lives – forgetting he is dead – who lived as Kempis espoused better than you.”

“I don’t know about that.”

He moved on pulling books out and flipping through the pages. “I’m curious. Some books are marked up and some show the pages turned over, why?”

I smiled sheepishly, “If I don’t have a marker, Francis, I’m too lazy to search for one.”

He doesn’t react to this but moves on. By this time he has been through my study, the living room, the dining room, the bedrooms, all laced with alphabetized books, even seeing them in the bathrooms.

“There is something missing here, don’t you think?”

“You mean a particular book?”

“No, I mean a particular subject, marriage, why no books on marriage?”

I am silent.

“Have you ever written on marriage?”

“No.”

“You should be something of an expert. It took you quite a vetting process to land happily in the state. How do you explain that?”

“I found love. I found someone that was more important to me than I was to myself.”

“Ah! That’s what Thomas Kempis says in his book, do you recall that?”

“No, not exactly?”

“I thought you had a reputation for remembering everything you read.”

Silence again.

“You explain your marriage, then, in terms of love, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“What about duty? Kempis has a lot to say about duty, too, you know?”

“I’m sure he does,” I answered but I cannot recall the specifics much less the general nuance of his question.

“Do you remember the title of the Kempis book?”

“Of course, I do, The Imitation of Christ!”

“Well, for a moment putting Christ aside and think about imitation. What did Kempis mean by it? Now, don't retreat into how we use it. Do you remember?”

“No, I can't recall.”

“Well, his idea of imitation was that you become the object of your affection and the object of your affection becomes you. It is a melting of the you into the greater you where the spiritual and the physical side no longer are in competition but are one. You should read the book again, James, I think you’ve gotten a little rusty. Your intellectual acumen is not waning is it?”

“I’m afraid so, Francis.”

“Sorry to hear that. Sorry to hear, too, that you have no books on marriage in your library. Do you think it is because you know all there is to know about marriage?”

“No. Hardly.”

“Do you think it is because you take your marriage for granted?”

“Absolutely not. I thank God every day for bringing Beautiful Betty into my life.”

“And why is that?”

“Why is that? Because I feel whole, I feel complete. I am happy. I don’t go through a moment of the day without realizing that she is a gift and the most precious one of my life.”

He smiled. Meanwhile, BB is just watching all of this embarrassed that she wasn’t prepared for his visit although we had been expected him. Seemingly reading her anguish, he turns to her.

"Do you see what you have done, my dear. You and millions of women like you have made marriage the most precious bond on earth, a bit of heaven if you will, and Thomas Kempis recognized this when he was posing a more spiritual bonding with the Christ.

"But I can tell you after more than sixty years of marriage myself, and after a demanding career, my wife Shirley was my heaven on earth, and I’m glad to see that you have been that for James.”

BB doesn't say anything, just listened.

“Does it make you two uncomfortable for me to emphasize the spirituality of marriage when so much emphasis today is on its physical dimensions?”

BB and I looked at each other and shook our heads.

“Good.” He looked at the many books and articles I had authored. Picked one up, and said again, “Alas, none here on marriage, but none either on your spiritual side, James, yet I see an extensive library on that topic on your shelves, why is that?”

“With all due respect, Francis, I think all of my works are spiritual. They just are not religious.”

He smiled knowingly again. “You refute me. I seem to recall you were good at that when I was alive.”

“But Francis, I have always respected your perspective only I’m not religious in the same sense as you are, were. I look at things differently, but as you explain Thomas Kempis to me now I think I have unconsciously used some of his devices.”

“No doubt, but your writing would serve you better if you were more religious. People like the security of religion like they like the security of marriage. It is why I’ve made the connection with Kempis and marriage. Kempis put his ideas in the context of religion while saying some of the same things you have said,” as he took one of my books off the shelf.

“I can’t recall that.”

“I'm surprised. For example, here you write you have never been too trusting of worldly people, neither was Kempis." He turned the page. "Here you write of your contempt for vain secular learning and so did he. It is evident throughout your books. I could show you if I had the time, but I must go. Have no doubt though you have a Kempis like approach in your writing." He studied me then smiled broadly.

"Surely you realized I was baiting you to see how you would react to the charge of being materially inclined.

"Religion, James, is not very spiritual in the operational sense and the reason why it is so writhe with conflict. Likewise, marriage is very spiritual in the operational sense when it works, and that is why I made this visit today. Read Kempis again. You will be surprised how much you owe him.”

With that, and without saying goodbye, I woke up, rushed to my study at 4 a.m. in the morning and wrote this.

* * *

FEAR IS THE GREATEST CONTROLLER OF ALL!

FEAR IS THE GREATEST CONTROLLER OF ALL!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April, 19, 2009

“Fear nothing but what thine industry may prevent, and be confident of nothing but what fortune cannot defeat. It is no less folly to fear what cannot be avoided than to be secure when there is a possibility of preventing.”

Francis Quarles (1592 – 1644), English author

* * *

This Sunday afternoon, I’ve watched a panel of experts on national security, freedom of information act, a narrator, judge, an archivist, CIA operative, and journalist.

It was a discussion of secrets, who should control the secrets, who decides what is secret and what is not, and what ordinary citizens such as you and I should know, as well as when we should know it, in what form, and through what media.

Quite frankly, it was exhausting watching and listening to them because it identified the principal engine of modern society, which is fear. If the world collapses on its own petard, it will be because of the lack of trust, and it is clear that those in powerful positions, both elected and appointed, relish the opportunity to exploit this dilemma.

Without fear, my wonder is if anything would move at all, and if it did how readily that would be and for what purposes other than to give employment to these people.

Fear, I have come to feel, while making us aware of possible danger and for self-preservation, which is instinctive to our nature, has been intellectualized and bureaucratized to the absurd. Consequently, mainly what we know isn’t so and what we don’t know isn’t so as well. What we do know in our own daily lives free of all the cloak and dagger maturations is that we possess the most accurate information around. Yet, we do feed this monster.

We do so by spending $billions to appease our appetite for fear. Erasmus would not believe the folly.

One panelist mentioned the “Pentagon Papers” of the Vietnam era were ruled by a judge, a former Harvard dean and Harvard president, as critical to national security, only to claim ten years later that they were not, and should have been made available to the public. It became academic as the New York Times published them in part as did the Washington Post.

The source of these papers was Daniel Ellsberg who worked in the Pentagon under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. In a comedy of errors worthy of the Keystone Cops, the Nixon administration created the “White House Plumbers.” This included the infamous plumbers G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt of the Watergate fame who appear as if out of central casting. They first perfected their high jinx of incompetence by breaking into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist's offices to dig up dirt to discredit him for releasing the 7,000 pages of Pentagon documents to the press regarding the Vietnam War.

To illustrate complexity on complexity, duplication on duplication, the Freedom of Information archivist on the panel mentioned there were over 100,000 pages of “top secret” classified material on the unsuccessful attempt of the Carter administration to rescue the Hostages in Iran.

It seems as if the Kats & Jammer Kids had planned the mission it was so inept. It failed to take in the weather, the climate (i.e., sand storms), the terrain, or demographics in Operation Eagle Claw, which was aborted in April 1980. Lost in the mission were eight servicemen and two helicopters. The irony is that industrialist Ross Perot mounted a similar mission, and successfully got his people out.

Regarding the 100,000 pages of secret documents on the Iran Hostage Crisis, after two and half years with an army of reviewers sifting through these documents, over 8,000 pages were declassified and released to the public. The last page this archivist read had to do with not taking milk into the desert because it would spoil.

President Truman created the CIA, J. Edgar Hoover legitimized the role of the F.B.I. with the killing of Public Enemy No. 1, John Dellinger, and as time has gone on we have created more and more secret agencies to match the Kremlin and beyond, as the United States and the world tilt increasingly on the precarious precipice of a nuclear hailstorm of Armageddon. Fear is the conduit.

But this is fear in the macro sense where people make their living and celebrate their high profile lives taking themselves too seriously in their primary role of creating a bunch of gobbledygook, and then reporting on it incessantly to the public in books and forums, television and radio, the Internet and public appearances.

I have called this “HYPE” (Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elitist) referring to the chief disseminators of this gobbledygook in THE WORKER, ALONE! (1995):

“HYPE is far less important, far less crucial to society’s redemption than HYPE, itself, would prefer to believe. HYPE is actually an aberration created by a passive society immersed in denial. Obviously, HYPE has no real motivation to change condition to a more optimum system, especially when it might prove threatening to its power. Why should it? As matters now stand, HYPE reaps the benefits of passivity. A disenfranchised workforce and indifferent citizenry deny itself the power it actually possesses. Were worker to take charge of their destiny, the identity and recognition they so passionately desire would follow.” (pp 84 – 85).

I would wager that a majority of those on the panel discussing secrets, and a majority of those in the studio audience asking questions of this panel, have matriculated at these HYPE institutions. We don’t have a monarchy. What we have is worse. Monarchies today are titular, ceremonial and a connection with the past. These are the people who run things, and they have been running them into the ground. They are our endgame.

What do they use as their weapon? Fear, of course. We are in the bad shape that we are in, say those HYPE people out of power, because of the HYPE people in power. Let me explain, HYPE people out of power say, why what the HYPE people in power are doing is putting us all hell in a basket. We listen because collectively we are passive and they are the wise ones. This worries me.

I also listened to part of a lecture by Thomas E. Wood, Jr., the author of “Meltdown,” a book in which he explains apparently why all our problems can be placed at the door of the Federal Reserve and Ben Bernanke. According to him, it is not our fault. In our passive innocence, we have been duped and led astray.

Wood has harsh woods for such people as Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman, who he sees clearly out to lunch when it comes to the economy, inferring no one was less deserving of the economic prize. When I hear such declarations, I stop listening.

From complexity to Occam’s Razor is a bit much, and it is a bit much because complexity, riddled with bureaucracy as it is, cannot be reduced to a few simple scenarios or declarations as this author purports to present.

Wood was fascinating, quick witted, and had the benefit of speaking to the choir about free markets and the free market finding its own equilibrium and so on, but I’m not knowledgeable enough to know whether his simplicity is laced with gobbledygook or not, as I have not read his book. Authors often get away with far more when they are speaking than with the printed word because most of what is said is taken through the eyes and not the ears.

I wish for once such obviously serious people didn't feel it necessary to have to discredit those who think differently than they do to get their points across. We need dialogue and serious exchange, but more importantly, we need dialogue with ourselves. What do we think, feel and believe, and what are we doing about it?

For these more than seventy years, I’ve been told I wouldn’t get anywhere in the corporate world because “I went to the wrong schools.” Well, I did get somewhere.

I was told I had too abrasive and honest a personality, was too straight and direct and that it would sabotage me. And they were right. It did, but I didn’t change, I motored on, and took the bruises and setbacks as par for the course.

I gave up a lucrative executive career in supposedly the best years of my life – my thirties – to be a writer because life made no sense to me as a worker. My da had told me as a boy that I didn’t even write a good letter, and he was probably right. But I did write, and I invested six figures into that possibility, and it mainly came back confetti, but what am I doing now, four decades later? Writing.

I was told when I was in my late thirties I was too old to go back to school. Those who would discourage me would say I would have to take undergraduate courses in the social and behavioral sciences. They were right. I did have to take such courses before pursuing my Ph.D. studies in organization-industrial psychology. But I did it just the same, going to school full time for six years, year around, and consulting on the side to support my family of four children moving into their teens. And I earned my Ph.D.

I was told that soon I would be too old to get a good job even with a Ph.D., "You're be over forty when you finish, and who will want you?” They were right. I was in my forties when I finished. They thought that morsel of fear would derail me from my course. It didn't.

To add a level of guilt to this, I was told I had a family to support, which I agreed was true, but I didn't agree that I had to make bushel baskets of money to that end. In any case, I did very well with my Ph.D., thank you very much.

They said I could never be a professor because I didn’t get it from the right school, but I taught as an adjunct for ten years at several fine universities, when I never wanted to be a full-time professor but wanted the experience to know what students were thinking.

A Honeywell colleague, a fellow psychologist, accused me of using Honeywell as my laboratory for my own purposes.

I looked at him and said, “Doesn’t everyone do that? I’ve used every learning experience I've had as my laboratory because I’m a writer. That is what I am, and that has always been what I am. I don’t think I’ve ever denied that to anyone, Jerry, hasn’t anyone told you that?”

He came back weakly, "That's not fair. That's not right."

"Jerry, what's not fair or right about it?"

"Using this place for your own purposes."

"It's using me, Jerry, and I'm using it. When we are of no use to each other, either Honeywell will fire me or I will fire Honeywell."

And so it was. He found that weird but I found it a reasonable contract. I’ve never made any employer or any boss think otherwise than my first loyalty was to myself.

My da, who was brave and courageous physically, was very passive emotionally and psychologically, died three days past his fiftieth birthday. He was afraid to live, afraid to assert himself, afraid to make waves, afraid to step out of the shadow of the miserable start he got with his mother dying when he was born and his da taking off never to be seen again.

By the time I was ten, I had heard every Irish argument in the book why we were poor. It was not our fault, much like Dr. Wood telling us the present economic crisis is not our fault. We were tricked. If so, I would come back we were tricked by our own self-duplicity. You can only be tricked if you're willing to be tricked. It takes two to tangle.

My da had an excuse to rationalize his fate. I did not. I had good parents, a stable home life, and an opportunity to learn. I took it, every bit of it. I’ve never considered anyone better, smarter, cleverer, more able or more gifted than I was. By the same token, I have never considered anyone less gifted than I am. I am convinced we allow the forces outside us to rule the forces inside us, and often to our disadvantage.

One time in a graduate school seminar I found a young woman especially brilliant and, after class, told my professor so. He said, "Are we talking about the same person? You know she is from Panama." She was also black.

I will not put limitations on anyone or myself. No one will define me nor will I allow myself to define anyone else. Nor will I compare and compete with anyone because I am not they and they are not I. I will neither believe nor disbelieve what you say because of who you are and what you are. Your influence will be a matter of its congruence with what I am.

We are a collapsing society predicated on secondary lives, and I have seen this happening increasingly so over the seven decades of my life, and I’ve attempted to alert those who will listen to that fact.

Is it that we are too full of ourselves that we don’t see what we have done to ourselves with our self-indulgence, or how we have corrupted the world by exporting our example? I wonder.

Life is not an “either/or” proposition. Life isn’t about being consumed with what others say or have or are, or by people who disseminate or are buried in complexity, but what is meaningful to each of us individually and pragmatically.

Life isn’t about being serenaded away from the pain or fear or embarrassment of reality by simplistic formulas that give us the answers that worked in the past, answers in which we shoulder none of the blame. Life is about embracing the fear and pain and embarrassment that are our experience and profiting from them.

This is not the past. This is now. And it isn’t those that strut their stuff on podiums or the Internet or television or in the giant assembly halls that have the answers. You do! We do!

French philosopher, mathematician, theologian, and physicist gave us this to think about:

“Two extravagances: to exclude Reason, to admit only Reason.”

* * *