LAGGING INDICATORS IN A CELEBRITY MELTDOWN!

LAGGING INDICATORS IN A CELEBRITY MELTDOWN!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 4, 2009

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“Have you ever noticed lagging indicators control our lives? We are told unemployment is a lagging indicator, that it persists as we are in economic recovery. You don’t have a job and can’t pay your bills, but the government says ‘not to worry, the recession will soon be over, that good days are ahead!’

“Lagging indicators are not confined to economics. They relate to everything. You can’t breathe for the pollution but the Environmental Protection Agency publishes new standards on carbon dioxide emissions to ensure improved air quality, but you still drive your big car or truck, dispose of your wastes haphazardly, and fail to see yourself as a contributor to the problem.

“Lagging indicators common to a large segment of the population are emphysema and diabetes, which are primarily life style excesses, but do people change their behavior?

“Joblessness is a lagging indicator of insufficient and inappropriate education yet nearly half the ethnic population of the country represents the most egregious case of primary and secondary school dropouts.

“Lagging indicators explain the unexplainable. So, I ask myself as a writer why is this so? Is it because people worry more about how they are perceived than how they perceive themselves? Do they lack authentic identity? Do they expect someone else to pick them up and make them useful? Do they think they are owed a living? To me, WILL is the lagging indicator of a Republic on the brink of losing the idea of freedom and therefore its collective identity.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., “Fragments of a Philosophy.”

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REFERENCE:

I shared my publishing woes with my readers, and they have responded. This is not surprising. Many are authors in their own right. They have encountered the barriers alluded to in that piece.

Some of these readers are academics and educators in such fields as sociology, psychology, management, languages, and the hard sciences, while others are writers as philosophers, novelists, journalists and entrepreneurs.

Optimists almost to a fault, they don’t see the lagging indicators driving them, and us, to extinction but rather see them as part of the ritualistic lexicon of our bureaucratic corpocracy. To my mind, these brave souls who write are uncelebrated, yet the last bastion of our survival. I hope for all our sakes that they are right in their optimism.

A READER WRITES:

Jim,

Sorry about the rejection of your most recent works. We both know that is the nature of the business. Critical reviews are meant to be critical and everyone has a perspective, it is not an objective world. Thank god.

About BK (Barrett-Kohler), there is no publisher I hold in higher esteem. I greatly admired Steve Piersanti and his team that makes the firm the best in my experience. I have also known Peter Block back to the time when we hired him at Searle in the 70's. I do believe he has one very good book in stewardship. Another B-K writer, Peter Koestembaum, is a wonderful man who like you makes his own road but lets his great mind lead him.

A BK book I strongly encourage you to read is one on our economic systemic debacle, David Korten's "Agenda for a New Economy.” It proposes how to FIX our mess not just complain about it. Though my retirement nest egg has shrunk, I understand why we seek to vilify the financial geniuses that created such a disaster for us.

We need to examine a political philosophy mouthed so effectively by a grade “b” actor, who a few decades ago seemed determined to lead us into destroying any government that might ask something more of us than our blood on a battlefield. Blood that I donated willingly but his recent follower into the White House never did.

Personally, I know my financial situation would be much better if my taxes had been raised enough to have a government that would watch over our super bright economic advisors that seemed to work the same miracle that Madoff promised.

Nothing is simple but clearly no one was looking out for the American public and yes any idiot must now recognize that an unconstrained economic machine only pays off for those who design and manage it.

Next time I do hope we have someone elected or appointed who cares about our economy and not self-interest being the route of all returns. Now if I tried to expand this I might have to write nearly as much as the fantasy writer Ayn Rand. At a younger age, I too nearly worshiped her. I read her words so many years ago and they spoke to my adolescent male ego, and then I grew up.

Maybe our country may also move towards maturity. With all you write, and perhaps particularly with what I sometimes don't agree with, you are helping us to grow up as a nation. I am optimistic but as I said in one of my last published articles I look to 2050 as the point in which I believe many of us will agree we are maturing as a people.


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A READER RESPONDS TO THIS WRITER’S COMMENTS:

It's interesting the perspective people get. Your friend did not say if hiring Peter Block in the 1970's did his company any good. Peter Koestembaum is a friend of Peter Block's but in no way his mentor. He is a philosophy professor that sounds good and has a way with empathy phrases - like Peter Block.

Steve Piersanti of BK is a smart cookie but it seems now that he is too attached to what made him successful in the 1990s and cannot get with the 2010s fast coming up.

So we move on and learn again that each person sees the world, as they want it to be rather than what it is or might be in other people's eyes.

Keep trucking.


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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

These two responders are accomplished writers who stay the course as their lights direct them. I salute them and all who develop the domain of their own personal opinions. Too often what we think, believe, value and cherish are second or third hand opinions of commentators who bombard our senses on radio, television and the Internet, and to a lesser degree, in newspapers, magazines and books. I am not looking for confirmation. I am looking for open minds.

One writer, responding to my publishing woes, after my being rejected by Barrett-Kohler, sings the praises of this publisher, as well as a couple of authors in B-K’s camp. It is based on his experience and is privileged, and is taken in that sense. I am a person who is disinclined to look up to others or to send hosannas their way as I am more inclined to be suspect of their motivation, especially if they suggest how I think and feel, or should.

The other writer, reading these comments, took exception to the claims of the first writer, again, on the basis of his privileged information. He happens to be intimately aware of my published, and unpublished writings. Both have read me for years.

No surprise, the three of us are or have been academics with differing perspectives on that experience. One of the tenets of my faith is that if you cannot write well you are not likely to think well. I have found most academics do not write well. Instead, they climb into their esoteric stratosphere of academia above the common plain where most of us live and hope, and write to each other in isolation. It was their books that I had to read in my advanced education. Now, I stay clear of them at all cost.

Paradoxically, when most academics come off that esoteric plane, and attempt to connect with us, they invariably write down to us as if they know us, can smell our sweat from fear and work, and can walk in our shoes while never having visited our world except in algorithms. They have never been exposed to the terrors of the workplace where the draconian certitude of bosses rule. Bosses keep us in line by the power of the paycheck and the ability to demote or fire us.

HYPE (Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elites), who do their case studies in empathetic understanding of CEOs and managers on the rise, have few clues as to the nature of our world. This has led them to leaderless leadership.

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My writing is to people who have risen out of that stench, or are having difficulty climbing out of it now. I find myself alone, growing old, no longer a pretty boy, and seeing the Grim Reaper just ahead. I write out of a life that is running out of innings.

I have worked in the dirtiest most toxic places as an industrial day laborer in a factory as a boy. That boy rose from a working class family in a factory community to virtually every level of organization and he uses that as his template.

God gave him brains, good looks, height and good health. He was blessed with the accident of being born in the United States of America, where circumstances spelled “opportunity.”

He was also born at a time when the nation was in the Great Depression, which meant when he came of age, there weren’t many like him, making for little competition. It didn’t hurt that WWII had been successfully concluded and the world wanted to “buy American.”

He had the good sense to know he couldn’t take his brains for granted, couldn’t depend on handouts to break his fall, couldn’t look to others to cut a path for him to follow. He was on his own, and had the lights to know it, to use it, and to not look back.

He was also privileged to have lived in a country in which the war never touched the continental United States.

He saw it an advantage not having an economic cushion to break his fall should he fail, no one to provide him with money he did not earn. With the aid of academic college scholarships (declining athletic scholarships), and lucky to live in a community in which industries hired college students in the summer, living at home and saving every penny he earned, he received a college education without any college loans.

To this day he thanks God for being born in a time of compulsory military service. This found him in US Navy, where as an enlisted man he was introduced to members of society more underprivileged than he had ever been. He loved the navy, loved the discipline, loved its sophistication in training, and would come to wonder why society lagged behind such sophistication. It was military service that earned him the privilege to use the G.I. Bill to continue his education to a Ph.D.

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All his publications come out of this acculturation. He doesn’t write someone else’s preamble but his own. It provided him with the perspective to publish most recently A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), which in a prophetic sense identifies why we are stuck and continue to be stuck, and shows that there is no indication of our finding our way out of this dilemma.

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Long ago, way back in the days when I worked for Nalco Chemical Company, one of my colleagues said that I was prescient, that I could read the future with uncanny skill as it related to Nalco. Truth be told I wasn't prescient at all but had the faculty of taking disparate pieces of information and weaving them into a conceptual grid, which I am still doing, but without too many in the power grid paying me much mind.

The fact that I persist is not that I am particularly patient or especially masochistic. It is simply a lagging indicator of “what is” versus “what is presumed to be.” People in the trenches, where I live, understand what I am talking about, but unfortunately, most people running the show do not.

We people in the trenches are told these high rollers are villains. They are not. They have abandoned their individual centers and gotten caught up in the fiction of “doing well.” They are lost in that fiction, and have come to believe they are brilliant as well as deranged when they are neither. They are simply lost.

To make my point, all these complicated derivatives on Wall Street, and these complex statistical instruments painfully being deciphered by the government are ARITHMETIC.

The business of business is adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. But in a skin-deep culture, which is other-directed not self-directed, you can fog these numbers up to resemble Einstein’s world until they collapse around you in shame, as they have for Bernard Madoff.

I think God has a good laugh at our expense. After all, computers are based on two numbers, 0 and 1, and you can't get much more basic than that. But I drift.

When I wrote WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), there was one writer, Dr. Thomas Brown, who could see, flawed as the effort was, that I was on to something. Virtually everything in that book written nearly twenty years ago has come to pass. That includes the demise of General Motors. Dr. Brown was then editor of Industry Week, contributor to PBS "All Things Considered," and co-founder of PBS "Market Place."

He authored a series of "lessons learned" in pamphlet form for Barrett-Kohler, which I thought were outstanding. BK didn't find an audience. Dr. Brown went against the grain but empathetically not polemically, as I am inclined to do, and he, too, failed. I rest my case with B-K there.

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Paul Krugman, the Nobel Laureate, is fond of referring to people in government and on Wall Street as being "smart," as if that has any meaning. We are told President Obama is “smart,” something FDR was not told. FDR was said to have had a first rate personality and a second rate mind. That said he led us out of the Great Depression and to victory in World War Two. Maybe we need more dumb people who do brilliant things and less brilliant people who do dumb things.

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Nothing that has happened, is happening and will happen surprises me. We live in an age of celebrity. The audience gives celebrities their identity. It is Faust for real. Celebrities are in the pleasing business, or externally directed rather than internally controlled and self-directed. What is construed, as self-interest with scores of flatterers and idolaters satisfying the celebrity’s every wish, is actually self-deception bordering on self-annihilation. Celebrity behavior more resembles that of the spoiled child than the mature adult.

To sustain their celebrity, to keep their audience coming back for more, it becomes a grueling contest of will to fill that need at the depletion of their own center.

Since the need of the audience is insatiable, and since their total orientation is to please others at the expense of pleasing themselves, celebrities eventually become a figment of their own imagination, an icon, a legend, and no longer a person. Small wonder that Elvis Presley and now Michael Jackson have fallen on their medications trying to be what their audience defined them to be, and then resolutely attempting to meet those impossible demands. What does it mean to make millions or billions and never having had a life?

When what you think, believe, value and cherish comes from the outside, it means your identity is created by others and belongs to them, and that you are but an instrument of their will in its fulfillment.

This programmed identity comes in the form of compliments, honors, promotions, success, and fortune. None of it has real meaning if it depletes you as an individual and makes you a stranger to yourself.

It is why when someone tells me "how smart someone is" it sends up a red flag. The smartest kid I ever knew flunked out of college. Smart people are failing because they are trying to be smart rather than act effectively. They allow others to define them and then accept that identity as theirs, when it is at the sacrifice of their identity and often their rare talent. One of the most toxic illustrations of our collective societal insanity is “American Idol.” The fact that it is the most popular program on television is a lagging indicator of the state of our collective mental health.

Novelist Elmore Leonard says, "When you read something, and you say, 'that is really good writing,' the author is getting in the way of his story." President Barak Obama is getting in the way of his story as he feeds on the dribble from television commentators and Internet bloggers, which I understand he reads religiously. God help us if he becomes a celebrity president like JFK, and starts to believe his own celebrity defines him.

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