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

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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.”

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