OVERWHELEMED AND LOST IN THE FISHER PARADIGM © ™

OVERWHELEMED AND LOST IN THE FISHER PARADIGM © ™

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 25, 2010

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A READER WRITES:

Jim -

A Don Quixote moment; a Socratic Academy moment; a Walter Mitty moment.

I live in the greater Washington, DC area, and one son lives on Capitol Hill.
(He works at the Library of Congress, no less.)

I once had the responsibility (at Bellcore, now Telcordia)

To support the creation of a new applications architecture

For the worldwide mesh of telecommunications capabilities.

My experience there was that the vocabulary of the applications space
Became a roadblock.

It seems to me that the Member of Congress have trod on their individual and
collective cranks (political correctness be damned) over just such a conundrum.
The character of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) reflects this "in spades",
Not to say "doubled, redoubled, and vulnerable".

The resolution of the short-haul and long haul telecom carriers back in the 80s is just one example.

Would it be plausible to establish an academy on Capitol Hill focused on?

Forwarding the cause of truth and transparency?

It might have a subcurrent of Legislators' Anonymous.

Your thoughts. ...

Norman

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Norman,

I am taken by your reference in this piece to Don Quixote, who was fencing against windmills, Socrates, whose academy should be committed to history, and Walter Mitty, who lives in his imagination finding the real world too formidable to enter much less contemplate.

In a curious way, you have hit on the theme of a mutual friend of ours in his book "The New Plague" (1985) by William L. Livingston, which relates to organizations in the postmodern world unable to cope much less deal appropriately with the challenges of the times. It is why I created THE FISHER PARADIGM © ™.

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It has happened before. Western Society has often been overwhelmed because of its inability to recognize or deal with its own toxicity.

It happened in the fifth century when the Visigoths sacked Rome.

It happened at the end of the "Dark Age" in the sixteenth century when modernity was born.

It happened again in the nineteenth century when post modernity was coming into view.

It is happening now when complexity to quote Livingston "exceeds the capacity of a single individual to understand it sufficiently to exercise effective control regardless of the resources placed at his disposal."

We think the Electronic Age is our salvation when it is only part of the problem. It is part of the problem because it fails to address our real problem. Simple? Yes, but only too true.

We have opted for entertainment when reality is too stultifying. The fact that the human race is now using drones instead of bows and arrows to fight its wars is no improvement on the status of man.

Reality is too daunting so we live in the pixel world of "Avatar," which incidentally has far more significance in identifying our times than a mere entertaining film.

We are a failed society, not just the United States of America, but also the entire Western World. We are programmed to fail because we live in an invisible world unaware of what is imprisoning us to our status.

A fish lives in the invisible world of water not knowing what or who is polluting its existence.

Our invisible world is culture and it is our culture that is toxic. The origin of that toxicity is hubris and folly of man, who keeps creating "things," applauding himself while making him increasingly irrelevant to his ambience, the invisible world that surrounds him, his culture.

There is no need to go into the specifics of this because you are an architect of one of the irrelevancies. Einstein could see where he was architect of another when atomic energy and nuclear power became the gunpowder of the postmodern era. Technology is not a solution when it exacerbates the underlying problem, which is how we think.

I have written a book, not subtle, not esoteric, but designed to inch us out of this sick world, this toxicity called CONFIDENT THINKING. It cannot find a publisher.

You see, Norman, our failure is that Socratic thinking still dominates and Socratic thinking is anachronistic in most instances.

(1) Socratic thinking has failed because it is not appropriate for most of the problems we face. It is inadequate to deal with change because it does not offer creative and constructive designs forward but instead propagates forward inertia.

(2) Socratic thinking has failed because it forces us to look at the world in harmful rather than helpful ways. It is obsessed with dangerous judgments and discriminations, which tend to make things worse (as in Congress and its politics). No nation or institution is the center of the universe but only one of its many stars. Post modernity is forcing us to realize this.

(3) Socratic thinking has failed because it encourages complacency and is geared to defending itself and to reify what is already known but is no longer appropriate. This prevents seeing the extent of its failure retreating into defensive arrogance.

(4) Socratic thinking has failed because its purpose is to solve problems with critical thinking, or with what is already known. We have to get beyond logic and rational thinking to consider complex interactive systems and how we can design a realistic approach to our problems within such frameworks.

That means getting beyond thinking in terms of process only and entertaining perception, valuing subjective thinking as complement to objective analysis, seeing the critical worth of ideas over simply reams of information, valuing creativity over deduction, and yes, encouraging provocative thinking over excessive analysis.

It is possible to describe something and propose a prescription to deal with the described problem without ever dealing with or understanding the underlying perturbation.

(5) Socratic thinking has failed because it sets out "to discover" the true definitions of its perturbations such as "justice." Your justice is not my justice, just as your freedom is not my freedom. Your truth is not my truth. It is the main problem of religion and philosophy that looks for the universal paradigm or system when no such animal exits.

(6) Socratic thinking has failed because it looks to develop "ideal norms" or rules that will apply to all when that is never the case. Isaiah Berlin has taught us that pluralism not relativism is the essence of humanity.

(7) Socratic thinking has failed because you can't build a society much less a civilization on discovery, and we are an obsessively oriented society of this genre.

(8) Socratic thinking has failed because its emphasis, indeed, its total dedication is to analysis and evaluation instead of design and creativity.

I know this brief description leaves you up in the air but I must get back to my novel. I am getting older by the minute and I would like to finish it while I am still able.

The last several years I have dedicated myself to explaining how Western thinking has failed because of its complacent arrogance, which prevents it from getting inside the extent of its failures. I have limited this to a primary focus on the complex organization writing several books on the subject, not to mention hundreds of articles, while always thinking in the context of what I have said here.

It is interesting that you suggest an academy that focuses on forwarding the cause of truth and transparency.

I was or am a founding member of an incipient think tank called THE NAPLES INSTITUTE. It has fizzled out because of internal jockeying, conventional thinking, and an inability to entertain creative thought.

You see the problem is not forwarding the cause of truth because truth cannot be discovered. It must be created, and the creation may defy every single tenet of what is now currently established as "truth."

As to transparency, how can there be transparency when we fail to recognize the culture is toxic, that we are swimming in this toxicity, and the culture must be radically restructured, indeed, reinvented for our survival?

My fear is that conventional thinking and wisdom will not disappear until the modern Visigoths invade and destroy everything that is now precious to us as they did some 1500 years ago.

Be always well,

Jim

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