THE ETERNAL PARADOX: PART OF WHAT WE DESIRE IS OUR OWN SUBJUGATION!

THE ETERNAL PARADOX: PART OF WHAT WE DESIRE IS OUR OWN SUBJUGATION!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 1, 2009

“The past contains precious resources for the present and future. It is therefore advisable to move backwards into the future with your gaze fixed steadily on the past, rather than hurdle headlong into whatever lies ahead of us. Those who seek to abolish the past – to draw a line in front of it and move on, as the current boneheaded mantra has it – tend to end up destroying a lot more than that. ‘New, new, everything is new,’ Tony Blair once rhapsodized. One wonders whether he had bird flu in mind.”

Terry Eagleton, Professor of Cultural Theory, National University of Ireland

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We have passed that legendary mark of the first hundred days of the presidency of Barak Obama. I have been busy reading my “Foreign Affairs” magazine, my “New York Review” and “London Review,” my “Time” magazine as well as reading The Tampa Tribune, listening to C-Span and C-Span 2, as well as reading Fareed Zakaria’s “The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad” (2003) and “The Post-American World" (2008), and of course a spate of books by my favorite, Isaiah Berlin, as well as skimming Bob Woodward’s pop novel as history, “The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006 – 2008.”

What comes to mind is the absurdity of our preoccupation. We expect all these apparently learned men and women to express what is repressed in us, and that is the eternal battle between desiring freedom and wanting security.

Their power is our fear, and our fear is their power.

We have by default awarded those in charge the magnificent role of gods, which they dispatch with the seriousness as if they were. I am not only speaking of those elected but also of those who assume the role to inform. I’m also speaking of those that by cunning and design rise to the pinnacle of the corporate tree, and I’m speaking of you and me as complicit in this whole theatre.

We all play our rhapsody with our BlackBerrys, iPhones and laptops with instant information circulated in nanoseconds across this tiny planet, raising the tendrils of our souls to respond to rumor like scared rabbits.

In our quest to be all that we can be, something is flawed at the heart of this quest, which can fester and poison our moral compass and send us off course groping for someone to bring us back on course and in control. There is always someone in the wing waiting to do just that.

The paradox is that oppressive political and moral authority flourish when our impulses are for freedom and self-expression rather than extinguishing them.

This is mainly because we are an eternal paradox to ourselves dogged by internal contradictions:

(1) We want freedom but will sacrifice freedom willingly for security.

(2) We believe in free markets as long as our jobs are secure and our economic status continuously improves.

(3) We have tolerance for minorities as long as they don’t live in our neighborhood speaking their gibberish rather than English.

(4) We tolerate other religions as long as they don’t impinge on Christianity.

(5) We uphold the principle of the separation of church and state as long as it supports our interests.

(6) We endorse the idea of emancipation in all its forms but surprisingly fail to exercise self-emancipation, which is critical to political and economic freedom.

In a word, we are less free today because we want our cake and eat it too. We want to eliminate tax havens and have the rich cough up a good portion of their filthy lucre to rescue the poor from itself, yet in human history going back as far as anyone could imagine this has never translated into the utopian ideal desired, and for reason.

The enlightened and the powerful have always assumed that the less fortunate want what they have and are, at least in part, never realizing that the poor are often poor in spirit as well as in body because they prefer that state.

We cannot rescue people by imposing our values but we can accommodate them to a certain degree by legitimizing theirs.

Developers want to clean up the slums used in the film “Slum Dog Millionaire,” which won the 2009 Academy Award as Best Picture, and build multimillion-dollar condominiums and business complexes on this prime real estate in Brunei, India. PBS “Frontline” showed that the majority of residences of this slum, many entrepreneurs in their own right, simply want to be left alone.

The paradox goes deeper.

We have had a “War on Drugs” through several United States presidencies, and yet the crimes associated with this war seem to escalate rather than diminish. It goes back to the internal conflict mentioned earlier: many law-abiding citizens in the main are regular users of recreational drugs, and so there is an active market for these illegal exotic chemicals. You cannot stop the entrepreneurial criminals if you cannot eliminate the demand. I wager there is not one person reading this that does not know a person or persons who regularly use recreational drugs.

Typically profiled on the “War on Drugs” ads are the dregs of society unwittingly consumed in the poverty associated with this addiction, but what about executives, doctors, lawyers, legislators, teachers and priests who are quietly kept out of the limelight who are culpably feeding this societal disease? We forget it is a $billion industry and feeds the demand for more police, prisons and political activists.

The same could be said for the “War on Terror.” John Le Carre has been a favorite of mine, and I prefer his amoral intrigue to his moral maze. That said the moral maze is evident in “A Most Wanted Man” (2008). It is a novel about a “suspected Islam terrorist” because of the dastardly crimes of his father. It turns into a comedy of converging spies of Germany, England and America on this innocent man as operatives of the “War on Terror” attempt to prevail. My wonder is how close is this to the truth of such operatives.

It is obvious to me that since 9/11 it is not only an economic bubble that haunts us but a psychological one as well. The books and articles I mentioned earlier are expressive in detail of our willing repressive inclination, that is, until our comfort zone is disturbed.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, U.S. National Security Adviser in the Carter Administration writes in the current issue of “Foreign Affairs” (May/June 2009):

“It is now evident that in the case of the second (Iraq) war, the national shock induced by 9/11 – abetted (for whatever reason) by a campaign to stimulate public fear, fueled by demagogic and undiscriminating language about ‘Islamofascists,’ ‘jihadists,’ and ‘Muslim terrorism,’ not to mention apocalyptic references to ‘mushroom clouds’ and ‘World War III’ – created a toxic atmosphere.” (p. 151)

Toxic or legacy assets threaten us in an economic sense, but so does the toxic climate produced by fear mongering threaten us in a psychological sense. Freedom, incidentally, is expressed psychologically as well as behaviorally.

POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE FREEDOM AND THE QUEST FOR COMFORT

Isaiah Berlin developed a model of the polarity of freedom, which I first discussed in my book "THE WORKER, ALONE!" (1995). It was appropriate that I did so because I could see workers were coming down on the wrong side of freedom. They were coming down on the side of "positive freedom," or restricted freedom instead of on the side of "negative freedom," or unrestricted freedom where individualism is nurtured and expressed.

Positive freedom is the freedom with a long laundry list of restrictions, always for our own good. Employers and union leaders have enthusiastically supported this freedom, as have conservatives of both the Democratic and Republican Party. It is no accident that positive freedom has driven Chrysler into bankruptcy, likely to be followed by General Motors, and Ford. Positive freedom ignores reality and represses as the chaos mounts trying harder and harder when it might better let go and let flow with negative freedom.

It could be said with reasonable accuracy that positive freedom, with the exception of the presidency of Andrew Jackson, among a very few others, has been the law of the land. We have been protected from ourselves because it was believed we needed protection. We couldn’t control our anger so there had to be laws and implicit rules of employment in which we were obliged to be polite, obedient, submissive, passive, reactive, non-confrontational and to let others do the thinking for us who were “more qualified.”

HUMAN RESOURCES AND THE MBA DEGREE

Over the years, the most consistent criticism I have received is my treatment of human resources (HR) professionals and my outright contempt for the MBA degree.

The majority of my career was in line management where I enjoyed a great deal of negative freedom. Late in my career, after receiving my Ph.D., I found myself doing organizational development ((OD) work out of the HR department, in a staff function, which I found had a running romance with positive freedom.

It didn’t take me long to discover HR never found a policy or procedure it didn’t like. HR subscribes to the dictum "the greater the chaos the greater the need for control," whereas I have found the "the greater the control the greater the inevitable chaos."

Each control procedure was, of course, an impingement on negative or unrestricted freedom. What amazed me more, however, was the willingness of white as well as blue-collar workers to go along with these impositions without a whimper. It didn’t even seem to disturb them seeing those in executive positions not so restricted.

QUESTION: What is the function of higher education if those so educated are not allowed to express negative freedom?

It was in my OD corporate work that I came to recognize the internal paradox of our nature, which is a collective desire for our own subjugation. Individualism, while being practically nonexistent, is one of the more successful myths of our society. We are a society founded on individualism with but few having the courage to practice the tenets of individualism.

All hell broke loose, as I have pointed out elsewhere, when on March 30, 1984 I gave a speech (Participative Management: An Adversary Point of View) to corporate and military executives. The essence of the speech was that cosmetic interventions of positive freedom were backfiring. I was quite nervous that day stepping out of the rank and file repressive world in which I was born to express what I saw and felt.

Heavyweight Boxing Champion, Muhammad Ali, did as well when drafted in the 1960s to go to Vietnam, and said, “Hell, no, I won’t go!” He was exercising his negative freedom but suffered mightily for it, as positive freedom at the time had no sense of humor for its expression.

As for the MBA degree, I taught as an adjunct for ten years in several universities’ MBA programs, and in interviewing many MBA graduates over the years, against the vocational nature of the curriculum, I concluded that it was a combination of filling the right boxes for promotion as well as focusing on economic enhancement at the expense of development in their chosen profession. There were exceptions, of course, but I’m speaking of the majority.

For example, I saw top engineers giving up their engineering to become lousy executives. Then too, once they acquired the MBA, I often worked with them in the corporation finding them equally non confrontational and unchallenging of superiors as they had been before. If anything, they were more passive than the rank and file blue-collar workers with whom they now managed.

It would appear that positive freedom is inherently paternalistic for the professionally trained as well as for unskilled workers. Both white and blue-collar workers are seemingly oblivious to their self-interests. It is as if they concede that they must be steered to what is best for them by submitting to a paternalistic or autocratic authority.

Some might call it poetic justice when the paternalistically arrogant and dogmatic ways of its practitioners finally catch up with them. Those at the top enjoy negative freedom and paternalistic authority as long as they are winning.

Brzezinski captures this:

“The ex post factor verdict of history is inevitably derived from a simple maxim: nothing fails like failure, and nothing succeeds like success.”

Executives across the nation are tumbling out of the tree at a record pace because of a series of failures across a broad spectrum of industries and markets in a spiraling down economy. The irony is that tens of thousands, perhaps even millions of individuals who have been locked in the stranglehold of positive freedom, looking for the company, church, country, society to set them straight, when only they could do it themselves, had the answers, knew the alternatives to avoid disaster but kept silent, going along to get along, until there was no longer a going or getting to go to.

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