SELF-MENTORING! OUT OF THE CABBAGE PATCH & ON TO THE GOLDEN HIGHWAY!

SELF-MENTORING! OUT OF THE CABBAGE PATCH & ON TO THE GOLDEN HIGHWAY!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 10, 2009

ABSTRACT:

Dr. Fisher argues the vertical organization is dead but not yet buried. It is however still holding up “vertical thinking” placards. He's not saying to cease and desist from using logic, compartmentalization, and other tools that have gotten us into troubling waters. He is rather insisting that we cease and desist from being half-wits, that is, thinking with only half of our brain.

As a man needs a woman to procreate in order to sustain the race, the left-brain (masculine) needs the right brain (feminine) to get us beyond the mess we are in economically, psychologically, emotionally and spiritually.

The problem, he insists, is that the left-brain is seduced by details and thus chases symptoms until it runs into another problem it cannot solve. Take the current stimulus package and economic bail out. Experts talk about the growing national debt as if printing money is a Monopoly Game where the sky is the limit.

It would never occur to left-brain thinkers to peruse the topography of the problem to realize the same chronic conditions reappear like old relatives, and stay and stay no matter how much fuss is made to get rid of them. Now, why is that?

Leadership, he says, is someone at the top of a vertical tree, someone so far from the ground he cannot see what is happening clearly, and of course it is on the ground where all the action is taking place.

Dr. Fisher has observed this to his weariness. But alas, stubborn as he is, he keeps trying to vie for attention, not for him, but of the problems at hand.

He claims we are so enamored of pyramids and Socratic thinking that we will go to our doom still so enamored. The pyramid climbers still dominate Wall Street. They still dominate most corporations, which incidentally, have also died but are not yet buried. They hold on to worthless stock options to attest to the fact that burial proceedings have not yet occurred. Is it heretical, he says, to say the corporation is dead? Whether it is or not, despite a world economy which depends on it, he insists it is.

We are enamored of technology, which is innocent in one sense, but what did we give up for it, and where is it taking us, and what price have we paid for the journey? He wonders, are we allowed to ask such questions? Are we allowed to suggest that progress is a pejorative?

Left-brain thinkers consider such questions when the horse is not only out of the barn but the barn has already burned to the ground. The global meltdown is axiomatic of this. Money changers have been too busy to notice as they were exploring new ways to make money without working for it, too busy to feel remorse for exploiting their neighbor and themselves to sense the fall out, that is, until it was too late. And who is their neighbor? Everyone is across the globe.

The picture gets even more tragic when action is taken. Left-brain thinkers go to the best MBA schools in the world to do something that will not disturb the status quo one iota. They are good students of cosmetic change, dissembling schemes, and radical surgery that doesn’t disturb the top branches of the tree from their perch but kills the roots. When the roots have died, they descend to earth in their golden parachutes, unscathed.

We have automotive and cigarette and insurance and banking and real estate executives appearing before Congress with their lying shirts on or with cup in hand after flying in on their private jets and walking into the conference room in their $3,000 suits, wondering why they skipped that public relations course they should have taken.

Dr. Fisher has been wailing about leaderless leadership for twenty or thirty years, but has been surprised by the blatant style of this Rogue’s Gallery. He thought their calloused performance would move the nation off the dime once it could see "these people don’t have the answers.” Indeed, they don’t understand the problem. They are stuck in vertical thinking.

He asks: “Would you want one of these people or the pyramid climbers behind them to be your mentor?”

He answers for you, “I don’t think so.” But these are the so-called “Best & the Brightest,” another Madison Avenue ploy that has become part of the lexicon which nobody challenges.

Dr. Fisher argues further we are at war, not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, which only fogs up the real issue. We are at war, he insists, with everything we think, believe, and feel to be true when most likely none of it is. We are at war with ourselves.

How could so many who have had so much realizing it so soon be reduced to so little? One day someone will take up that question and write a new philosophy of waste, missed opportunity and unintended consequences.

No question, he says, the ecology of our environment is in jeopardy. He doesn’t doubt that, but it is the ecology of the mind that troubles him more. All the metaphors associated with global warming could be adapted to that ecology. He says, “People, we are sick to death with hoping for change without the courage to insist on it.”

Change for change’s sake, he knows only too well. He is not talking about that. He is talking about leaving the nest of counter dependency. He is talking about leaving childhood behind and growing up. He is talking about pain and struggle and failure and disappointment and fear, and embracing them instead of running from them. He is talking about a workplace that works and where workers find joy in what they do. He is talking about learning how to self-mentor in a world gone totally mad.

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THE GENESIS OF CHANGE AND THE PARADOXICAL DILEMMA

We have the clash of two moral systems permeating every aspect of society: the amoral system of capitalism and the moral system of the individual.

Caught up in this amoral system are the church, the state, and the nation. It is not to suggest that socialism or communism or any other ideology is superior. It is the nature of how they operate, proliferate and sustain their existence.

This makes it difficult for the individual, even in a society that claims it celebrates individualism, to maintain his moral compass and find his way through the wasteland.

Thomas Carlyle once said, “There would have been no French Revolution, no America, were it not for this insignificant monk, Martin Luther.”

Who was Luther’s mentor? God, of course, was his mentor, but certainly not his bishop, cardinal, nor his brothers of the cloth, or the pope.

The early sixteenth century was a time of great change. It was in the air. Several decades before, Guttenberg had invented the moveable type printing press, and books were being made available, ideas were spreading, people were being educated, not just the clerics, the money changers, and the merchants, but ordinary citizens.

It was a time not unlike our own. It took an individual to break free from the pack at great personal and life threatening risk. Imagine a humble monk telling the world the mightiest organization on earth was corrupt. In 1517 he nailed his 95 theses to the Wittenberg Church door, and the world changed with that dramatic move.

Luther identified church corruption for the selling of indulgences to fill the pope’s coffers, but he couldn’t have fathomed the temper of the times from his vantage point. His liberating theology came from within. He was acting out of passion and need. Erasmus, only nine years before, had published “In Praise of Folly” (1508), which sarcastically implied priests as intercessors were not needed for Christians to practice their faith nor was there need of a church hierarchy.

The times had an appetite for change, Luther gave the times the rationale for change, and Guttenberg provided the means to disseminate change. Books in the language of the people created nations. Exchange of goods and services created a new class of bookkeepers, and the whole process of a learned class destroyed the feudalism of serfs and masters, and accelerated the Renaissance, which would continue well into the next century.

It was a paradigm shift. It reverberates to this day. It turned the moral equation upside down.

We have all the ingredients of change today 500 years later, but thus far it has been a superficial phenomenon. Yes, the Internet, computers, video games, television, cell phones, iPods and all the rest are creating static, but they are foot draggers compared to Luther and his times.

We spin on forward inertia and aspire to preserve the status quo while insisting we’re changing it. Pope Leo X did the same when first dealing with Luther. We have a huge investment in order which gives way to constant chaos. We wrap change in the tinsel of technology with ergonomics, empowerment and electronics, social engineering and psychometrics (i.e. polls) and wait.

The individual is faced with the dilemma. Does he join the queue and leave his moral compass behind, or does he see his society out-of-date and out-of-tune with the demands of the times and charts a new course for himself? Luther did.

Can the individual, living as he is in a reactionary society, take the initiative and go it alone? Or should he remain obedient, compliant, polite, obsequious and self-effacing when the purpose of the organization is not what it does?

Luther overcame 1500 years of cultural conditioning. We are asking the self-mentoring person to overcome 2,000 years of the same conditioning. Is it possible? Is it necessary?

Each person will have to decide that for himself as he has been programmed in learned helplessness and nonresponsibility. Now, that that is not working he is being asked to be self-reliant and responsible which is antithetical to his programming.

Complicating the situation further, he is expected to work effectively integrating horizontal and vertical activities into unified decision-making when there is no such mechanism for such behavior except possibly on paper. The worker in today’s climate is a homeless mind looking for purchase. Neither allowance nor acknowledgement has been forthcoming for the psychological blindfold he has been forced to wear most of his working life.

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NATURAL LAW AND SELF-MENTORING

Despite the gloom I paint regarding the challenges of the individual worker, there is something that permeates his existence which he knows every time he looks at a sunset, every times he goes fishing and feels the quiet of the great outdoors, every time he walks in the wilderness and smells the air, hears the sounds of nature, and takes in the breathtaking view of mountains and valleys, winding streams and massive lakes. Here natural law is at work with its moral consistency, its moral law that every ant and animal instinctively knows and by which they all abide.

If this seems as if I’m reaching, I’m dead serious. In our bones as an animal on this planet, we know what it takes to get in the flow of natural law, and we also know the aberrations of the immoral and self-defeating that prevent that confluence.

We live in time when society takes one step forward and four steps back, and hasn’t yet been rocked by this dizzying entropy. There is a conceit in man that he owns this planet when he is in fact an intruder. The self-mentoring person is guided by this reality and adjusts to its demands accordingly.

Natural law is not acquired through our brains but through our bones like all other animals. The self-mentoring man doesn’t reason himself into consistency with the laws of nature but by treating the environment as sacred. He has no desire to waste or exploit but use and return to nature what it gives him to sustain himself.

How does this work in a practical sense? He treats his body as a temple eating, drinking, and behaving with moderation, not because it is fashionable, or consistent with some religious dogma, but because he believes in natural law.

He develops his mind as an instrument to serve others; he uses his talents to make a homeostatic connection with nature and his fellow man, plants and animals.

He needs to be leery of counterfeit ideas that promise him riches or celebrity or comfort beyond measure, which can only corrupt his moral judgment. He has to be as weary of the men of the cloth as the miscreants of society, as they share a common aim of claiming his soul, which is not his to give but only to share with nature. He will have to be constantly aware of the danger of being caught in the breach.

In ancient times, it was God who was constantly on watch. Now it is a mechanical drone, a hidden camera at traffic stops, in a shopping mall, eating place, or in a lapel pin, or in some other electronic contraption no bigger than the palm of your hand.

As invasive as these invisible devices may be, more invasive is the subliminal stimuli that reaches your eye or ear or permeates your person as you go about your business. The self-mentoring person must be constantly on his guard self-correcting to keep him consistent with the laws that guide his nature.

The rhetoric from the rostrum in joyous solipsism’s is sophist in nature and not genuine exchange. It purrs and pouts and performs but should not be heeded if it is not consistent with the osmotic balance of the soul.

In self-mentoring, you must realize values change without changing; information intensifies without informing; technology enjoys solipsistic hubris without changing behavior; more people graduate college without being educated; more experts have the answers without knowing the questions; and more paradigm shifts occur without anything shifting.

Matter can neither be created nor destroyed but only transformed. This pretty well covers the validity of natural law.

SO WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE THE SELF-MENTORING PERSON ON HIS WAY TO THE GOLDEN HIGHWAY?

When we think of a golden highway, we think of money, wealth, security and ease. That has been the golden highway since the time of Luther, who gave birth to capitalism. Has it made people less anxious, happier, saner, and more civil?

That is a question the self-mentoring person must ask himself. If he thinks this describes the golden highway, however, he will be disappointed. The golden highway of which I refer is the idea of finding work that becomes love made visible, shared with a person that puts a bloom into your cheeks, and in which personal and professional conflict is managed but not avoided, in which fear is embraced and not escaped, in which struggle and pain and failure are the conduits to success.

Someone might misread this as if I am saying, “Do the right thing!” I don’t know what the right thing is for the self-mentoring person. He must work that out for himself. I can only say that it is by embracing life in active pursuit of developing your inherent ability and not worrying about being exploited or taken advantage of that is the key to the rhythm of life.

The self-mentoring person finds himself in a culture. There is the culture of the greater society, there is the culture of the home, there is the culture of the community, and there is the culture of the workplace with several subcultures within it.

A culture is a mindset as if it were a person saying this is “right” and this is “wrong,” this is “good” and this is “bad," this is "what you should do" and "this is what you shouldn't do."

Now, if these various iterations of culture allow the self-mentoring person to thrive, then, all the better.

But if any of these cultures fails to support the rhythm of life to which his body and soul, and in his bones tells him he should be experiencing, then he is in the wrong place.

That was Luther’s problem. He tried to fit into the church’s theological and behavioral demands made upon him. Indeed, he struggled mightily, but alas, he could not fit. He could not breathe. He could not think. He was desperate, not brave, but desperate to find relief, to liberate his soul from its stultifying confinement. And so he published his 95 theses on the Wittenberg Church door, and changed Western Civilization forever more.

Self-mentoring in the end as in the beginning is about making choices consistent with personal needs.

There is no point in looking for a mentor because he or she is going to have a bias, which is not yours, and therefore cannot be consistent with your needs. As much as such a mentor may know the ropes, and want to help, you must make that determination yourself. Can you learn from others? Of course, but you can learn a lot more from yourself by learning to understand the rhythms of your own body and soul. The answers are never with others, but within you. You are not programmed to look there, and that is why self-mentoring is an option that is a necessary as well as sufficient condition to happiness and well being.

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