THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ and UNITED STATES CONGRESS

THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ and United States CONGRESS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
January 12, 2010

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A READER WRITES:

It would be interesting to see the Fisher Paradigm in action, as it might be applied to the people's Congress of the U.S.A. for example. Or is that dysfunctional body just a product of idealism vs. pragmatism? Any OD-inspired suggestions?

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Thank you for your response. Simple as The Fisher Paradigm©™ is, it is not our natural inclination to think in non-linear and irrational terms or to bridge the linear and rational towards a holistic perception.

We are programmed from birth to be elemental thinkers when all our behavior is controlled by systems. As a consequence, we behave in non-linear and irrational terms, while we are prone to deal with this behavior in linear and rational interventions. No one escapes this net.

The "rich and famous" are caught behaving irrationally because they are in the limelight, but we are all guilty of such behavior to a greater or lesser degree. We cannot separate ourselves from those that we would call "our idols," "our heroes," much less “our leaders.” Everyone is cut from the same stock.

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We can take polls, develop psychometrics to check beliefs, attitudes and values, make assessments of organizations such as Congress, all in the interest of deriving a better appreciation of how things are, but always failing to reduce our frustration. The failure is to realize Congress is “us.”

In a way, you could say we are a conundrum and Congress reflects that mystery:

(1) We talk endlessly about change, but seek stability;

(2) We say we are up to the challenge, while busy defending the status quo;

(3) We support progress, but we have never left the past;

(4) We applaud humility, but are always attracted to the most arrogant of celebrities (Simon Cowell of American Idol);

(5) We have standards of performance in school, work, Congress and life but judge people and performance always in subjective terms;

(6) We don’t mind someone describing a problem but we are offended when that description is provocative and hits us where we live;

(7) We are externally organized by where we live, when we were born, where we were born and grew up, and what we eventually do in life.

(8) We are totally externally organized but feel a need to preach self-organizing concepts until we are blue in the face.

I could go on and will.

(9) We are in an Information Age that is bereft of ideas;

(10) We celebrate the deductive reasoning of scientists and Sherlock Holms' character, but there hasn’t been an original idea in any form since the beginning of the last century.

(11) We are dedicated to innovation, which is not creativity; it is just making what we already know, better;

(12) We have a mania for identifying trends but are controlled by the flow of non-trend things. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote a powerful book on this proposition called simply, “Flow”(1990), which has been quickly ignored.

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In A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), I said Congress stayed the same, missed the changes, and left the future up for grabs. Congress wasn’t alone. We are Congress!

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(13) We talk about “thinking outside the box” when we are constantly reifying and reinforcing the box to which there is apparently no escape.

(14) We are programmed in school and life to become critical thinkers, which is to think in terms of what we already know. We call it getting an “education.”

(15) We have little patience and less interest in creative thinking – what Einstein did – because we didn’t learn to do it in school and, besides, it means taking risks and considering what we don’t know but could find out.

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THE FISHER PARADIGM©™ and UNITED STATES CONGRESS

The Fisher Paradigm©™ takes note of these paradoxes. It does so only in the interest of throwing some light on our problems. Look at the Congress of the United States, 435 members of the House of Representatives and 100 Senators, and what do you see?

(1) PERSONALITY PROFILE:

Members of Congress are urbane, essentially extroverts, reasonably well educated, mostly lawyers, and have a modicum of the colloquial banner of their native states, when they want to use it, so can change the intonation to favor the dominant accent of their audience wherever they are.

The “acquired self,” which is the personality is something that they have been working on since grammar school, when they first campaigned for becoming a patrol boy, class monitor, or class representative.

Campaigners are what they are and what they do, and as a consequence, what you see is never what is there. They are actors on a stage in which the play they are in is life that affects us all.

Members of Congress learn never to tell the truth when a lie would be more efficacious, or say what they really think and mean because that is politically incorrect and can get them in hot water.

Vice President, Irishman Joseph Biden, knows this well. House Majority Leader Harry Reid has felt the whiplash himself of late. Reid got into trouble when he said he thought President Obama could get elected because “he was a light-skinned African-American with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

Reid's comment is in a new book that will fly off the shelves. What he said everyone knows is true because as much as we like to preach we don’t have a bias the moment we say so we express it.

Notice Reid said he didn’t have a “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Obama, like Kennedy and Nixon before him, is a consummate politician, and consummate politicians are never what you see. You only see the shadow of their personality and its inclination they want to show at the moment.

(2) GEOGRAPHIC PROFILE:

Member of Congress come from all parts of the nation from Hawaii to New York, from Alaska to California, from Minnesota to Florida but they dress alike, speak in the same tongue, and even think alike.

One of the great mysteries, geographically speaking in terms of “blue” and “red” states, is that we have a two-party system, Republicans and Democrats, who appear all to be in the same party.

We don’t have a two party system but a one-party system in which the party out of power has the role of being against everything even if it is for everything. Meanwhile, the party in power promotes everything even if it is against some things. For example:

(1) We have the “Obama War” in Afghanistan, a war that he abhors but promotes;

(2) We have Health Care Legislation that Republicans oppose that looks amazingly like the health care Republican John McCain advocated on the campaign trail.

This may seem odd, but this is quite appropriate in a one-party system playing the charade of a two-party Congress.

Should the Republicans become the majority in Congress, the roles will be reversed but with the same histrionics and stage performances.

We have lost our appetite for regional politicians. There are no more Andrew Jackson’s, no more Harry Truman’s. Our presidents since John F. Kennedy have come out of the stage casting offices of Hollywood.

Candidates have to be war heroes (Eisenhower), urbane (Kennedy), or consummate politicians (L. Johnson). Wouldn’t it be something if the “rogue,” politician, Sarah Palin, who is not urbane or educated beyond her dress size were to slip through the cracks and become president? It could happen! She is a frontier woman, and in your face politician like Andrew Jackson. What has happened before can happen again. It would be a break with the one-party system that has been in place all my lifetime.

(3) DEMOGRAPHIC PROFILE:

Member of Congress are largely male (90 percent), largely white (90 percent), largely wealthy (80 percent), largely educated in prestigious schools (55 percent), largely lawyers (80 percent), largely over the age of 55 (80 percent), largely overweight (80 percent), largely white headed (90 percent) as if this is a requirement to look wise, largely Protestant (80 percent), largely from cities or metropolitan areas (80 percent), and largely in the pocket of lobbyists (100 percent).

Where they are most like us is in the range of their intelligence, which is very average. That includes John F. Kennedy, who was thought to be so brilliant, but didn’t have an I.Q. much different than George W. Bush. Look it up!

We don’t feel comfortable with people who appear smarter than we are. We are comfortable with people who sound like us, think like us, and value what we value, even though we know they probably don't. It's all a matter of performance. We give surprising high marks to performance. That is why television debates are so important.

Joseph Wambaugh said, “You get the kind of police department you deserve.” Does that extend to Congress? I think it does.

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Cleverness is not wisdom. We like cleverness, and like to think of ourselves as clever. Congressmen are often clever but seldom wise.

Wisdom takes hard work; wisdom takes staying with a problem longer; wisdom takes failing frequently before succeeding; wisdom takes going against the grain of popular thought; wisdom takes being politically incorrect; wisdom takes getting beyond traditional thinking. I don’t think we are ready for wisdom.

We would prefer to criticize and complain about our two party system that is one party, and to keep reelecting the same clever people that reinforce this one-party concept.

You see we are the problem, and we can’t slough it off to the 535 members of Congress. We can't but we will, and that is the problem.

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