SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT --- YET ANOTHER THOUGHTFUL RESPONSE

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT --- YET ANOTHER THOUGHTFUL RESPONSE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 17, 2009

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A PROFESSOR WRITES:

Jim,

You are clearly speaking to a larger audience than I am as a professor. In doing so, you bring hope to me and I am sure to many others.

As I was born at the end of World War II, 1945 to be precise, I feel little kinship with the baby boomer generation. My pride is with that Greatest Generation that preceded mine.

In every generation, there is a mix of everything obviously and my confidence in this current generation is very high, not because they are so very special now but because the challenges they face will make them become very special.

Our last Great Generation had to sacrifice much for the common good; now the same challenge has been presented again at a time when society is being pushed hard to show its stuff.

Today external economic forces plus internal corrupt practices, forces that have always been with us, are pushing it. They are being challenged like we were to grow up and use their God given gifts of intellect and drive to develop our species to a higher state of being.

So, why should this path be an easy one, why should there not be differences emerging that must be dealt with, and why would they not care about leaving a better country for their children than the one that was passed to us?

As in all systems, and particularly it seems in political ones, there is a lot of noise. Also some fury and yes I agree many, many sounds that just seem bizarre, and if we move to judgment, not at all mature or demonstrating any evidence of much thinking.

But the sounds are necessary, and again from a systems perspective, we must have what I am sure you know, "requisite variety.” Our diversity is in so many ways our deepest strength.

You won’t find this in China but you will see it in India. That country "practices" democracy. India makes many of the same mistakes we make.

I have much confidence in democracy. It is a guiding principle that has a way of helping us to develop our ability to grow up and play the role of adults. For the first time in human history much of the world has this same dream of freedom. They also want a form of capitalism that makes their material lives richer as well. However, we should never assume we are a democracy, but should instead recognize that we are trying to learn how to be democratic.

Yes, it is doubtful if some adults are doing much thinking beyond the level of fear-induced frustration. Their angst is that they are not getting their way on everything. As a consequence, some of their actions appear uncivil and disrespectful. To create a truly participative version of democracy it will inevitably necessitate a lot of sound and fury.

Since my research over the last 40 years has always been concerned with how we can create and maintain democratic organizations, I am keenly aware of all of our failures. Yet I am very optimistic. I have a simple symbol to reflect my hope for the future. It is SOS. That hope is based on SELF ORGANIZING SYSTEMS. This has yet to be fully understood or developed as potential solutions to the many problems holding us back. Each day more can be learned about how to tap our ability to self-organize. It is this quest in practice and theory that keeps me energized.

In times of trouble, clearly an SOS is not a bad call. Yes, we do need help but we ironically are the help we need.

So how do we help to learn what can work better and help develop us as people who still have a role in this amazing world we live in?

Just as the Greatest Generation you represent gave us much to learn, the present generation will be the one that changes the world, and shows us how to use our strengths and intellect to create a more participative and less hierarchical system. It will work to create a more sustainable economy with greater transparency and justice for a larger proportion of the world's population.

If we could ever have one more "I have a dream speech" it would be the one that again points out those universal human goals but this time we have the capacity to create the actions before the speech.

It will not be easy but that is how a generation lays claim to the honor of being the “Greatest Generation.” Keep the faith. One short human life is hardly the scale needed to judge how human progress is made. Never forget that we have been far worse off. The images of the future created in the midst of WWI were dismal and bleak but look around and see what in less than 100 years we have achieved.

Ken

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Ken,

Thank you for taking the time to express your thoughts on this subject. Self-organizing systems, incidentally, are in sync with Edward de Bono's "lateral and parallel" thinking. They dovetail with my insistence that we need an internal governor and moral compass in order to be in control and make appropriate decisions.

In a 1996 book (The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend), I wrote: “We are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass and our way.” Nearly a decade and a half later, I see little evidence to revise this assessment.

I am much more of a skeptic than you are, bridging on the cynical, but of course you know that. Some of my essays now in the hopper will no doubt illustrate this with some acridity.

You flatter me as being part of the "Greatest Generation.” Despite all the hype of Tom Brokaw’s book of the same title, this generation had no choice but to go to war. I was not yet a teenager at war’s end, but my uncles were in that war with one on Pearl Harbor when the Japanese bombed the islands on December 7, 1941. He survived with a broken back.

His brother operated an LST (Landing Ship Tank) carrying troops ashore in the invasions of North Africa, D-Day Invasion, and the invasion of Sicily, and of Italy at Salerno. He, too, survived but saw a lot of carnage.

I collected his letters and edited them into a book for his family of those adventures. What came through in his correspondence and diaries was a teenage kid too naive to be scared and who enlisted simply to be with his buddies, several of whom didn't survive the war.

There is a difference between then and now that I sense is gone forever.

It is an innocence and paradoxically an implicit confidence that everything will turn out all right in the end. That was then. Now, everything is an act, a dramaturgic play, and a product of subliminal stimuli on television, radio, the Internet, and in film with the constant cacophony of impulse stimulus-response to create synthetic behavior. My wonder is if anyone born after 1965 has a working center.

My reason for saying that is that I am thinking of my two cousins here, good boys who wouldn't have recognized a vice if it walked up and attempted to seduce them, strong boys, athletic and fun loving, disciplined boys, who feared their parents, the police, the government and took the Red, White and Blue for granted. They were Iowa boys used to hard work and few kudos. They were programmed to get passing grades, stay in school, get a job, marry, have kids, and stay in place. Instead, only eighteen and nineteen-year-olds, they found themselves in the navy fighting a war. They were willing to die for their country not knowing quite sure what Nazism and Communism was all about, but trusted those in charge did, people who they referred to as “solid,” an expression of the day, and worthy of the sacrifice.

The Greatest Generation was naive. All the generations that have followed have been increasingly sophisticated, political, amoral, self-serving and belligerent. A more appropriate caption for my cousins’ generation would be “The Last Generation” of regional and collective solidarity, which was committed to a sacrosanct and national American Culture. That is all gone.

We now live in a fragmented and fractured universe and all the optimism in the world is unlikely to put the pieces back together. That said if there are ten million like you in a world of six and one half billion souls even the miraculous is possible. No one can fault your great heart.

Be always well,

Jim.