WE ARE ALL LEADERS OR NONE OF US ARE!

WE ARE ALL LEADERS OR NONE OF US ARE!

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

Reference: The Don Farr Network is not a website but an email network of some 300 hundred participants who have in common having come from a community in the middle of America growing up in the middle of the century, having been born in the Great Depression, and seeing the values with which they identify eroding if not disappearing. They are not timid in expressing their opinions about the world in which we live. The Don Farr Network is an open forum. This is a typical response to one of my missives in this case to my review of Jon Meacham’s “American Lion” – Andrew Johnson in the White House. My response to her remarks: “We are all leaders are none of us are.”

A WRITER RESPONDS:

Jim,

Your thoughts on Andrew Jackson a few days ago were really very interesting to me, considering my faint knowledge of details that occurred at that time.
I have a friend that is very interested in our political situation and we discuss it regularly (not difficult since we are mostly of the same mind on that subject) and since she is one of those who do not like to read long missives, I keep telling her to be PATIENT.

You did bring in the status we find ourselves in now and I found your comparison of Jackson to what is happening now…. a new insight for me and I think a line has to be drawn and a stand has to be made!

Maybe you recall that before the election I decided I couldn’t take the smears on the Don Farr Network, so I opted out. I’ve been told it is going on again with name calling (Nazi’s, dictator’s, socialists, etc.) and I am glad I don’t have to read all that bull!

I do enjoy your writing and long as it is…well worth reading. I can understand why Dick Asmussen wanted your input on his efforts. He’s a good man and a long time friend of my brother.

I have never traveled east except by plane to Florida and on 9/20/09 we are leaving for a two week auto trip to Washington DC (I have always wanted to see the Capitol and sit in the gallery when Congress is in session) and see the Lincoln Memorial and White House).

We plan to be in DC for several days and see most everything, that is, the Smithsonian and space museums, etc. We will go on to Boston attending a Red Sox game on the 27th with tickets behind home plate; and visiting the Freedom Trail, then on to seeing the Statue of Liberty, and from there on to my ancestor’s memorial in Andover, Mass., after that to baseball’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and lastly Niagara Falls.

I hope these old legs don’t give out! When I told our son David we wanted to go but were afraid of traffic, and probably wouldn’t go because of that, he discussed it with his wife and called to say he has a lot of vacation he needs to use before years end from his company in Chicago, (Lucent Tech). He said he’s been there twice and would love to go again and would go with us. That’s all I needed to hear; no more worries about auto travel.

His wife will be working at the school and can’t go along but we can’t think of anyone we would rather go with than David.

Most people I talk to have already been there and considering my age, I’d better get going. Gene has never cared for traveling but will go when I say, “we’re going!” He’s not much for politics either and will probably not care about the gallery visits I am planning! Ha ha.

Anyway Jim, I enjoy your writing. Our best to you and Betty and your family.

Your friend and classmate,
Carole

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Carole,

Thank you for your note.

As for the Don Farr Network, imagine if people didn't have an opportunity to vent their frustrations and the ghosts that haunt their souls, imagine that. I like you and others don't see much intelligence in such ranting but I am glad there is some outlet for such emotions, and the Don Farr Network provides it.

As you say, you have a like-minded friend and enjoy discussing things with her. The network looks for somebody to hear them, to feel their anger and anxiety, to empathize with what irritates them.

Politicians exploit this both from the left and right, and from the middle as well. Don is not a politician but a conduit to ventism, if there is such a word, bringing some balance into the dialogue by the mere fact that the Farr Network exists.

I keep seeing again and again in the current situation a repeat of what happened in the recent past, and wonder how much actual control politicians have over anything. My suspicions are that lobbyist's rule the game now, then, and perhaps always, the unelected but ever present influence peddlers.

Obama is making some of the same mistakes Bush made. Much as many would like to think otherwise, Bush and Obama have this in common -- they want to do the right thing for the American people, but somehow the will or instinct or courage or stamina deserts them at critical times. We are all too human including our leaders.

We can't judge Obama in six months, but he made a terrible mistake by listening to the media and attempting to be FDR and do wonders in his first 100 days.

Bush wanted to be a compassionate conservative and he let that vicious band of neocons wreck his agenda with the exception of Africa. In Africa, Bush has done wonders, more than any president before with his disease relief funding. Somehow this is getting through the corruption in Africa to make a difference. Otherwise, much of his administration was a disaster.

Obama went to Africa, talked to Africans, made Africans proud to be men of color and then got on a plane and came home.

Let's see what he does for the next four or eight years for Africans. God love her, Hillary Clinton followed him with an exhaustive schedule, and tried to plan substantive relief, relief we don't have the funding for, and made that one blunder about "I'm Secretary of State, not Bill Clinton," and that is all the comedians on television can remember, and the op-ed cartoonists in newspapers.

If you follow my writing, and I know you do, I find myself more an independent than any other label when it comes to politics. They are all creatures of a system slave to the media, and the media, paradoxically is a dying, so where does that put government?

We are living in the incipient chaos of democracy. Government as we know it is being replaced by instant news created and recorded by ordinary citizens on their various electronic contraptions. Everything we know is true is not; everything we once relied on is now irrelevant. It is scary and wonderful at once.

We are in a new world, a world we never saw coming, a world in which freedom of thought and action, of belief and values, of place and space is becoming a reality across the globe.

No government of the East or West can contain it. No government of representative democracy or totalitarianism can survive without recognizing that to govern governance must be congruent with the will of the people.

The other day I saw the octogenarian physicist Freeman Dyson being interviewed on Charlie Rose on PBS. Dyson is of Quantum mechanic fame. He applauded the economic rise of India and China because two-thirds of the world population resides in that quadrant of world society and the poor cannot help but get a boost.

Now, the test comes. Can China and India, two nations that are spending huge amounts of their respective GDPs in "national defense" budgets, can remain peaceful and not become paranoid?

This may seem like a quantum leap but paranoia is based on fear and anxiety, on believing in legends and figments of the imagination, on ghosts of the soul. When people have an outlet to express these ghosts, such as the Don Farr Network, when they can get them out of their systems bizarre as they may be, there is hope that reason will triumph over imagined fears in the end.

I have a saying in my writing, "We are all leaders or none of us are." You are a leader. You have always been a leader. You have passions and beliefs, and you need not apologize for them. You want to get to the source of your values by visiting the institutions in Washington, DC that are fundamental to your beliefs, as they are fundamental to all Americans. I applaud you for this.

But at the same time, I would say you should listen to others that think differently than you do, not to change your mind, but to understand what undercurrents reside in the ghosts of their souls.

Our danger as a people is when we remain silent and are too timid to express ourselves. The current anger, confusion and conflict over healthcare reform are the best evidence I have seen in a long time of democracy in action. It demonstrates my premise of "everyone is a leader."

A TIMELESS FORMULA

The greatest stranger in our existence is ourselves. Remember what cartoonist Walt Kelley says in Pogo: "I've met the enemy and it is us!” We rationalize that we are other directed as if it is a good thing failing to understand self-direction is key to everything including accepting ourselves as we are and others as we find them. Richard Dawkins wrote a book called “The Selfish Gene” (1976) showing in the context of evolution that genes meet their needs first and foremost, and that socially we do this as well as a matter of survival. We may think we are altruistic but our chemistry suggests otherwise.

That said I have developed a simple formula to describe this inclination:

BELIEF + BELONGING = BEHAVIOR

That is why “true believers” are so vehement in their beliefs. They have support of like-minded spirits. At its most toxic state, it becomes a satanic broth as with the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s, the John Birch Society in the middle of the last century, the Ku Klux Klan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the Provisional Irish Republican Army (Catholic) and the Ulster Unionist Volunteers (Protestants). To this day, with peace somewhat restored in Northern Ireland, a giant wall separates Catholic and Protestant residents from each other in the same neighborhood.

Demigods, religious fanatics, totalitarian rulers, mystical gurus and churches, exploit intolerance and differences to their respective advantages. What would South and Central America be like today if the indigenous cultures had been allowed to survive? What would the United States be like? The question is moot because these cultures have been destroyed.

What are gangs but loose federations of beliefs and tenuous belonging where it is “us” against “them,” whoever gang leaders choose to be them? Gang tribal rituals of initiation often include murdering someone at random. Ludicrous? Yes. Insane? Yes. But it is people following this simple formula. And so it has been throughout time.

If you want to get inside what motivates a group, examine it in terms of this formula. Even the hysteria of “American Idol” follows this equation. It is the belief that celebrities are different than the rest of us. They are not although they practice indulgences and excesses that we can only imagine. It is having a sense of belonging to others who equally adore these synthesized celebrities that translates into hysterical adoration and frenzy behavior. It provides identity, a sense of authenticity, a sense of being someone connected to someone bigger than self, but of course it is all phony.

When belief is based on someone else’s values and experiences that are believed to be superior to one’s own, and belonging is the sense these significant others have a key to unlock the mysteries of your own existence, then you will behave apelike imitating the way they speak, dress, swagger and behave. It will be as if you are a clone of them while your authentic self withers and dies. Ultimately, you are likely to reach the point where you don’t know who or where you are, or what you are about. You feel everyone has let you down, but you never point a finger at the only one that has, yourself.

FOUR SIGNPOSTS FOR UNDERSTANDING OTHERS

Much as we might like it to be otherwise, we are like that selfish gene, and knowing that promotes understanding, and in turn being understandable to others. I have found the key to understanding other people can be reduced to four signposts:

(1) We all love ourselves. Since our egos are fragile, we'll do about anything to protect them.

(2) We all are more interested in ourselves than in anyone else in the world. That is why we attempt to turn conversation around to ourselves no matter how bizarre that is.

(3) Every person you meet wants to feel important. Treat that person with respect, whatever that person's station or circumstance, and it will be returned tenfold.

(4) We crave the approval of others so that we may in turn approve of ourselves. The hardest person in the world to truly be friends with and to like and to give the benefit of the doubt is not someone else, but ourselves.

Incidentally, the TIMELESS FORMULA and FOUR SIGNPOSTS are in THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996).

Be always well, and enjoy the Capitol, a Major League baseball game, Cooperstown, and all the rest.

And always be well,

Jim

PS BB gave me a subscription to the SMITHSONIAN magazine. Pick up a copy of it and you will want one, too. It is delightful and informative.