TIGER WOODS: THE RAGE OF SOCIETY AND THE MONSTER IN US!

TIGER WOODS: THE RAGE OF SOCIETY AND THE MONSTER IN US

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 24, 2010


In football, there is an expression “telegraphing the pass,” meaning what is to happen is a fait accompli because of the precondition of the act. The same is true with the history of ideas. Where we are today is a materialization of the preconditions of ideas generated over the past three hundred years.

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There is currently much drama associated with a professional golfer, Tiger Woods, a golfer who happens to be the best in the world, possibly the best that has every played the game. It has been discovered he has clay feet like the rest of us. This is not acceptable as we expect our heroes to be more like gods than men. When our heroes appear mere mortals, then they differ little with the rest of us. This is impossible for us to fathom. We are stuck with the unsavory fact that no one escapes the telegraph pass. No one.

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So, what is the good doctor talking about? He’s talking about the weight of ideas over time that have made society and therefore us as we are

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A more basic question is why do we need heroes? The answer can be found in our admiration of others who generate power, are purposeful and manifest combination in superior performance. The athletically gifted have the same biology and chemistry as we all do while those who excel in thought have the same brains that we possess but are more driven to make use of these gifts. It is easier for us to admire than to get up off the couch. Heroes are engaged and we are spectators to such engagement. Otherwise, they are the same as us reacting to the same 300 years of programming unconsciously as we are.

Heroes have a drive to prove they are different, and to be different they must stand out from the rest of us. It is an obsession that has become the rule. They step out of the norm and become representatives of the extremes of our nature. It is not Darwinian. It is conceit. It is arrogance. And it has always been so.

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One of the peculiar things about human nature is that we think of it in terms of weakness. We that go with the flow and never leave the crowd are said to lack the discipline, the passion, the motivation, and the commitment to be outstanding, as if being outstanding or becoming a super duper hero makes life more meaningful. It doesn’t. It makes us more controlled vulnerable and dependent and living up to the expectations of others for us without ever discovering what makes us tick in and of and for ourselves.

We live for accolades, or we dedicate ourselves to being fans of others thinking our heroes are different when they are drowning in the same human foibles as the rest of us. The problem is that heroes may think they have escaped even when repeatedly reminded that they have not. This is such a case with Tiger Woods. Those we place among the exulted ranks have the same clay feet as us all. Nature is not arbitrary. Nature has no special allegiance no special lobby. Nature has no free lunch. You overdraft Nature on one scale you pay for it on another. A nest egg of a $ trillion cannot change Nature’s exactitude.

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Yet our inclination is to put certain people on pedestals and celebrate them until they slip and fall from these heights. We expect them to be more than human so that when they fall we can treat them as less than human. Such is the folly of man.

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Our society did not become so hyper, self-indulgent and permissive in a generation. It has taken centuries for us to reach the level of self-absorption and permissiveness that exists today. We have gone from a God fearing spiritual focus where the Church and clergy ruled the roost to a secular society where skepticism has led to a whole new set of isms from agnosticism to atheism to capitalism to communism to socialism to full blown materialism in less than three hundred years. We now have the oxymoron of China with a communistic political system and a capitalistic economy, and celebrate it as the wave of the future when it carries the diseases of the two isms in the name of progress.

Intellectuals that might not be on the tip of our tongue have changed the furniture of our minds and thus our behavior over the centuries.

We are a product of their preoccupation and are now saddled with their collective madness. They are names we may come across in some college course, but they were (or are) very real very flawed and very decisive in their influence to this day. This is but a sample of a few of them.

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JEAN-JCQUES ROUSSEAU (1712 – 1778):

It was Rousseau who wrote the “Social Contract” we love to quote: “Man is born free and is everywhere in chains.” He possessed an interesting madness. His great gift to society was to make those chains real by giving a philosophy adopted by Lenin to mount the madness that led to communism and totalitarianism.

He invented the cult of nature, introduced the critique of urban sophistication, and branded civilization as artificial. He rejected the idea of gradual improvement and looked for a more radical ideal that was more intuitive and not confined to reason.

We can thank Rousseau for discovering the individual and leading to the Renaissance, the delving into the self and presenting it for public inspection and consumption.

He saw the advantage to being outwardly frank and inwardly full of guile. He concluded from this trend that man is corrupted and naturally selfish, that he is controlled by vanity and self-esteem.

From this came the obsession with what others thought of him leading to his being competitive and acquisitive. This led in turn to a tragic divergence between appearance and reality, and to the creation of the artificial man.

He saw the coming Industrial Revolution and capitalism leading to avarice and alienation.

Like others who will follow, Rousseau was obsessively self-absorbed, in effect, only a petulant child who loved people but had little use for individuals. He had a strong sense of self-pity and deprivation and a monstrous ego with an obsessive need for the world to take notice of him.

Like others that will follow, he had an uncanny capacity for self-publicity and self-promotion, but unlike others he was a born writer and the prototype of the self-made man.

It should be mentioned at this point that all these men were autodidactic. They had various levels of formal education but were constant students all their lives.

Rousseau, as is the case with the others, was vain just short of madness saying, “I love myself too much to hate anybody,” yet in truth he was a virulent hater, another characteristic of them all, self-deception.

Still, what sets them all apart is that they didn’t deny or conceal their weakness, but emphasized it as a virtue. In the case of Rousseau, it was his vulgarity. He admitted he was uncouth, unpleasant and rude but on principle. “I am a barbarian,” he declared but had a higher calling that necessitated its expression.

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Rousseau, like the others, was incapable of repaying his debts, borrowing from those who could least afford it, but doing so callously without conscience. He would make the indebted feel guilty while he the borrower was incapable of feeling so. “However much it may have cost you to give to me,” he would say to the loaner, a debt he never planned to repay, “you are actually in my debt as it has cost me more.” Anyone who helped him was doing himself a favor because he was a great man.

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Paranoia is so huge among heroes and the great, and none more so than Rousseau. He quarreled ferociously with friends and belittled them before others. Being a scalawag himself, and untrustworthy to a fault, he projected this in others.

Love and truth were often on Rousseau’s tongue but neither found their way into his personal life. Again, this is common among those who promulgate lofty ideals. It is fundamental to their script and but commonly toxic in their personal and professional lives.

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Rousseau like others who are to follow was an indifferent parent. He was an original mind but a sick personality and, unfortunately, shares these attributes with these others. Our modern society is set on a foundation of this madness.

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KARL MARX (1818 – 1883):

Marx we know from his “Communist Manifesto,” which was written mainly on secondary information, as he led a secondary life in the British Museum Library. Incredible as it may seem, he never actually collecting valid primary research data for the ideas he espoused and took up right where Rousseau left off.

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Everything we know about Marx was borrowed. There was apparently not an original bone in his body.

His research, which he claimed to be scientific, was not. It was eclectic and secondary. He was not a vigorous scholar but a persistent one.

St. Augustine, who is celebrated in a similar fashion, influenced society as well as the church from the fifth to the thirteenth century with the institutionalization of his ideas on sin, hell, heaven and salvation.

In modern times, Marx has had a similar impact, not because he was right or had answers, but because his ideas were institutionalized into communism. Marx, a Jew, was baptized a Protestant but drifted away from that faith to be mainly atheistic. He never became an orthodox Jew but the Jewish influence is very much present in scholarship and writing. I can relate to this, as I am a renegade Catholic but know I am very much a Catholic writer.

Common to Marx as others discussed here is that he was not interested in finding truth but proclaiming truth.

He is a giant because he was a poet, journalist and moralist and had an uncanny capacity for self-publicity of his ideas. Perhaps no one in the annals of man was more persistent in formulating his ideas.

On balance, though, he drifted from a doomsday scenario to an economic scenario with an artistic rather than a scientific vision.

Like Freud and Frederick Winslow Taylor, the concept of science was casually stated but dogmatically presented which of course refutes the possibility of scientific disputation.

Marx greatest gift was that of a polemical journalist.

He was a great reader, as were all the others, and has been given credit for many sayings he never invented.

Heinrick Heine (1997 – 1856) first said, “Religion is the opium of the people.”

We should not be surprised. Kahlil Gibran (1883 – 1931) was the first to say, “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.” He said it to the Lebanese people fifty years before John F. Kennedy said it in his inaugural address.

The irony of Marx, and he is not alone in this tribute, is that he was for the cause of the workingman but never worked at a job a day in his life. He was incorrigibly deskbound to his ideas.

Moreover, he wrote about the squalid conditions in cotton mills but never visited one. He wrote about the suffering of the laboring poor but never interviewed a single soul in such straights. His style was not that of the investigator researcher but the polemical vindicator of his proclaimed beliefs. He showed little interest and less inclination to acquire scientific evidence of boots on the ground.

It is true he was a moral philosopher with a wide interest in humanity writ large but little interest in individuals writ small. He was an indifferent husband, father and parent at home. His long-suffering wife lived the disparity between high ideals and attention to wife and children.

Marx, like Rousseau, thought he was owed allegiance because of his important work. No matter how great the sacrifice of others, he thought it appropriate to expect more.


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We now know some scientists have played tendentiously with select facts regarding their research. This is true of global warming at the moment. Marx was an expert at bending and blending information to corroborate his thesis. Vigorous or careful researcher had little appeal to him.

He looked for verification of the truth he had already decided existed and not the other way around.

His crimes against truth are his use of outdated data, selective study of industries, quotes only of bad conditions ignoring reports to the contrary, and totally disregarding progress being made with capitalism. His works were structurally dishonest.

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We mere mortals who are subjected to these giants of intellect, and who must suffer for the conclusions they make. This goes back as far as St. Augustine and now beyond Marx as ideas of thinkers are institutionalized as the way it is, when the way it is, is only that way because they have said it was so.

Skepticism was once a cherished filter that screened out the toxic intellectual waste thrown at us so that we could breathe the purified truth as we came to know it.

We have chosen to forget, perhaps because we are too busy, that truth and freedom and love and meaning do not spring from abstract workings of the mind and imagination of products we purchase on a shelf, but are deeply rooted in the personality and melancholy of the thinkers.

We have abdicated thinking to others like we have abdicated exercise to top athletic performers. When they win, we win; when they lose, we lose. Could anything be more tragic?

Thinkers and doers are often exploiters and more often than not their works and lives are structurally dishonest. We are complicit in the affair when we become spectators to life, and let them dictate our existence as our equipment rusts and atrophies in the attic of our minds.

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We know that Rousseau was something of a dandy, and that Marx was a permanent exile.

The pattern of men who have made our world shows them to frequently be outsiders, and with few exceptions, men of deep reflection and little action. They consistently displayed poor hygiene, handling of money, and being insensitive to the needs of others. They were controlling, often bohemian, difficult to work for or live with, given to being idle and dissolute, and seldom, and this may surprise, systematic thinkers.

Outside the mainstream, while craving its attention, they lead secret lives that ultimately were their undoing. The irony in death is that a mystic image developed around them and helped to perpetuate their ideas and to romanticize their lives. They have added to this mystique by carefully constructed autobiographies, which have proven in their mendacity that no one escapes the figment of their imagination.

What they did do is step away from the crowd in their thinking and action and made up rules to suit their inclinations.

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We are a species enamored of the idea of “greatness” with some mounting the quest to save humanity from itself when they cannot save themselves from humanity. They talk much about truth but have proven to be great liars, talk about perfection and flaunt their imperfections with impunity. They burn with a desire to create a better world when their own personal world is falling apart for lack of attention. The daughter of the great psychotherapist, Erik Erikson, wrote at piece in The Atlantic Monthly (November 1999) complaining her father never had time for her mental problems when she was growing up.

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HENRIK IBSEN (1828 – 1906):

What Rousseau did for the eighteenth century Ibsen did for the nineteenth century. Henrik, a contemporary of Tolstoy, created the theatre that we enjoy today. His work became a powerful source to women’s liberation yet he was horrible to women in his personal life. He used women to dramatize his ideas and cared little what it did to them or their reputations. You see the pattern here. He saw himself outside the constrictions of ordinary souls. There was a contrary strain in him:

(1) He preached women's rights but hated their independence.

(2) He wanted women to get ahead but not to compete with men in any form. He preferred their freedom be limited to the stage.

(3) He was for workingman, and workingman rights, but knew nothing about workingmen. He thought it repugnant to be associated with them or their causes, again limiting his association to the stage. His approach to art was creative selfishness. The little guy was prominent in his plays but he had nothing to do with him in h is life.

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LEO TOLSTOY (1828 – 1910):

Tolstoy was a true intellectual giant, but also the biggest puzzle. His two great novels, written over 100 years ago, still sell hundreds of thousands of copies every year but writing was an embarrassment to him.

No one has ever put words together better than he has. Read pieces of “War and Peace” or “Anna Karenina” – anywhere – and it will melt your heart. He had a gift like Dickens and Flaubert but preferred to “save the world” from itself, than write, when he could not save himself from the world.

If you know anything about Tolstoy, you know he was a religious zealot, but a profligate human being. He was a compulsive gambler and drinker, and was cruel to his long-suffering wife who he treated like a serf. To the very end he was dastardly, secretly signing the copyrights of all his works over to a daughter and leaving his widow out in the cold, penniless.

Our greatest writer was a bastard. He wanted to lead the world in a crusade, when he had no aptitude for leadership. It is one of the peculiar predilections of intellectuals. They think they can lead, and no one was more self-deluded in this sense than Tolstoy.

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With greatness what you see is never what you get, or what the great produce is seldom a reflection of what they are. It is more likely a profile of the opposite extreme. The great have a will to power with a feeling of being anointed with something the rest of us lack.

Tolstoy was born into the Russian aristocracy. This was a form of slavery known as serfdom. Aristocrats owned the land and the serfs came with it. There were aristocrats in Tolstoy’s time that had as many as 200,000 serfs. Tolstoy inherited only about 700 with his land. He was never comfortable with the idea of serfdom.

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Another pattern of people who get above the radar is that they seldom believe in conventions such as marriage and fidelity. Nor do they believe in paying their bills or living within their means. Their most grievous error is forgetting who helped them get to where they have gotten.

Tolstoy, by the way, penned the line, “All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” He knew a lot about such unhappiness because he orchestrated it.

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Like the others mentioned, Tolstoy was great at celebrating the theme of love. He embraced the concept in the abstract, but had little acquaintance with it other than as self-love. You get the impression these great men were incapable of love, but yet claimed love was the ultimate value of humanity.

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ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899 – 1961):

Whereas Rousseau changed politics, Henrik Ibsen changed theatre, Tolstoy defined prose, it was Hemingway who created a new ethical style as a novelist and short story writer. His influence exceeded the boundaries of literature in that he defined modern American man.

The whole macho craze has Hemingway’s footprint. He coined that expression, “grace under pressure.” He was speaking about writing but he could just as well have been speaking about the exploits of Tiger Woods or Larry Bird when he said,

“Find what gave you the emotion, what the action was that gave you the excitement, everything must be done in brevity, economy, simplicity, strong verbs and short sentences (he could have been saying golf strokes or handling the basketball) do nothing superfluous or for effect.”

Hemingway saw prose as an architect. He became the model of an age for attention grabbing action. Look at film and television drama today. Plot has evaporated replaced by pyrotechnics and hard breathing like the television drama, “24.”

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The story I’m telling is that each of these men of achievement became prisoner of their own imagination and celebrity.

They came to believe they were different, that the rules didn’t apply to them, that they were practicing anarchists outside the law of restrictions, that they had a right to live huge not realizing this amounted to ritualistic isolation.

Most high achievers are loners surrounded by sycophants; private persons with no privacy; control freaks out of control; shy to the point of mania but craving idolatry, bored to tears all the way to the bank.

When they fall on their petard, they expect understanding and empathy when it doesn’t exist in their makeup. They believe they deserve it because of their many sacrifices as if it were we that had put their feet to that fire.

These patterns have become society’s collective DNA, which means there is no comfort in pointing fingers.

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BERTRAND RUSSELL (1872 – 1970):

Take Bertrand Russell who epitomizes the whole lot.

Russell lived almost one hundred years, a trained mathematician, who wrote as if an expert on everything. He did so because he was a "genius," and a genius has no limitations. Genius is an equally meaningless word as is greatness, both words of which we seem enraptured.

He wrote books on geometry, philosophy, mathematics, justice, social construction, political ideas, mysticism, logic, Bolshevism, China, the brain, industry, ABC of atoms (long before the atomic bomb) science, relativity, education, skepticism, marriage, happiness, morals, idleness, religion, international affairs, history, power, truth, knowledge, authority, citizenship, ethics, love, biography, atheism, wisdom, the future of disarmament, peace, war, crime and many other topics.

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Now, there is nothing wrong with writing books about subjects of which the writer is not actually an expert. What is wrong is when such writing is valued as “brilliant” – another non-word – and taken seriously without close examination.

One thing of which you can be certain is that people of brilliance are stupid in many other ways, as extremes in one direction have a natural counterbalance of extremes in the opposite direction. Nature did not create any perfect human beings.

The danger with Russell, and I have read many of his books, is that his character comes through when he departs from what he knows well replaced by his hyper and meddling personality with something of the odor of the crackpot. “Why I am Not A Christian” (1957) is an example. When I read the book, I couldn’t believe him serious, until I saw him on television. I have no problem with him not being Christian but I do have a problem with his puerile arguments in obtuse syllogisms.

* * *

Like the others, Russell was an incredibly creative self-promoters.

He craved the limelight and managed to stay in it most of his adult life. He was not good at doing anything but thinking and even then he could go off the rails. A completely pampered man, he loved women only insofar as they would indulge him. For example, he never learned to make tea although he was addicted to the beverage.

Russell was an outsider, too, who forced his way in as an insider never content living in the isolated world of pure mathematics. Gregarious and everywhere, he thought logic and mathematics could explain everything and solve anything. Logic was the fire of the gods.

What is surprising, and biographers are having fun with this, is that in all of his writings there is one consistent theme – he had little regard for accuracy or for verifiable sources. He, like his predecessors in far less scientific endeavors, made many of his facts fit his preconceived theses without apologies, although tantamount to heresy in science and mathematics.

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All of the men described here were vain but some to comedic extremes. Henrik Ibsen loved medals and honors and would seek them to the point of embarrassment. Once in his possession, he would wear them around the house as part of his wardrobe. .

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Another thing in common is that they saw themselves as moralists against evidence of lecherous personalities. They used women to their purposes sexually and otherwise. Common as well is that these men were generally physically ugly. Women throughout history have looked past this to be romantically attracted to minds of brilliance. These men were no exception. Once discarded, these women often attempted suicide causing these great men little guilt or discomfort.

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All were either first born or the only child. When they were the first born in a family of many other siblings, invariably they were treated as if an only child. Moreover, at maturity, they were often diminutive in stature, physically plain bordering on ugly but were never wanting for beautiful female companions.

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JEAB0OAYK SARTRE (1905 – 1980):

No one was more diminutive or ugly than Jean-Paul Sartre. At five-two with bulging eyes, he became the darling of the permissive age with his doctrine of existentialism.

This gave the individual the right of self-responsibility, the right to criticize everything and everybody, and the responsibility for nothing. Young people were encouraged to live in the moment and take from it what they will and not to have to apologize for anything.

In his existential philosophy, he created the justification for permanent adolescent. It is the reason we have no adults running anything anywhere today.

No one need ever grow up or therefore grow old.

Like many other myths, Sartre didn’t invent the word “existentialism,” the press did. It is one of those meaningless journalistic inventions that reached the credibility of truth. Now, politicians; pundits, professors and psychotherapists are doctrinaire existentialists, which means we are all saddled with the immaturity that no one can escape.

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Great thinkers are great drinkers so one wonders how many ideas have the aroma of the spirits that gave birth to them.

I say this because none of thinkers I have profiled – including the scientists and mathematicians – are systematic thinkers. They are doers crowd pleasers puppets on a string dancing for the crowd in which they periodically reinforce their judgments into the fabric of alcoholic or drug induced doctrines.

We endorse their silliness with behavior defiant of our roots and call it progress.

You could say despite the adulation, attention and celebrity we have awarded them, they periodically stand on their head, so to speak, and look ridiculous.

Sartre wrote much about boredom and absurdity as if it were our problem when he was bored or absurd. It is not his fault that we took him at his word, as we did Freud, and made their sickness our own.

Sartre, in old age with a coterie of idealistic youth following him and mimicking his every grunt, was the Pied Piper of the times as society departed from good sense into a psychedelic haze.

In three hundred years we have gone from spiritual values to secular materialism, from utopian idealism to runaway hedonism, from self-responsibility to permissiveness, and from confidence in reality to a flight from reason.

It all started back in the time of Rousseau but Sartre and others in recent times have provided the catalyst that was added after World War Two to bring everything to this mockery fruition.

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Today, when so much is going wrong, when the explainable is no longer making sense, when everything is in a state of flux, a state that it has always been in, but previously it was more tectonic, the fault is not in the stars but in man.

There is not one person reading this that does not live in a messed up family, not one that does not know of the sins described here, or the violence and trauma that is associated with such excesses. We live in a sick age and a sick society, which is not new, as every age has its societal diseases. Being messed up has become the norm. Instead of being charitable to those that stumble, we engage in schadenfreude, which is the enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others as compensation and distraction from our own.

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GEORGE ORWELL (1903 – 1950):

A word that is common to all those described here is “childish.” Not one of them could be described as an adult mature or otherwise. Adulthood seems anathema to thinkers who feel more comfortable in the puerile world of attention. There are exceptions.

George Orwell published “1984” in 1949. The book like the man was truthful and prescient. It was Orwell who said,

“Ordinary people have a stronger sense of what is common decency, a greater attachment to simple virtues such as honesty, loyalty and truthfulness than the highly educated.”

He was an adult and he was right. Over my long career working at every level of organization I have seldom encountered an exception to these words.

Orwell stepped away from his privileged class and public education to see and write about the world he was in working as a policeman in India, among other jobs. He saw the real world without apologies or hidden agenda.

He didn’t glorify the Spanish Civil War as Hemingway and others did, but wrote about it in a balanced view in “Homage to Catalonia” (1938).

He saw the collapse of traditional morality and spiritual certitude leading to permissiveness and violence and a new language to justify it all in his novel, “1948” with the newspeak.

He previously had published “Animal Farm” (1945), at the end of WWII, addressing the corruption of revolution and the wickedness and indifference that corrupt leadership leads to no matter how utopian the cause.

Not only have I found Orwell’s words true, but I am astounded with his honesty. When other thinkers would bend the facts to suit their premises or promote their celebrity, he could and would not.

Orwell saw how language was misused to the point of meaningless. He was appalled with such words as “great” or “brilliant” or “genius” as they were used in his day. Imagine what he would think more than fifty years later.

Commentators today use these as throwaway words as preface to their remarks. Orwell was suspect of formal education when it was used to warrant listening. He saw political behavior as largely non-rational and not rule susceptible to solutions generated and therefore impossible to hold water. We see this in Washington, D.C. today.

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Our permissive society didn’t just happen. It is a three hundred year program in our retreat from good sense. It has even invaded sport. But why should sport be any different than the rest of society? Tiger Woods is a mathematician on the golf course, but a failed student in arithmetic in life. So, what is new?

Creators of our permissive society have:

(1) A penchant for patriotisms and the greater good but no answer to senseless wars.

(2) Perpetuated violence by qualifying what is good and bad terrorism.

(3) An appetite for leadership but no one who can lead.

(4) A platform for prisoner rehabilitation without consulting prisoners.

(5) Urban renewal plans for clearing the slums but no place for the slum dwellers.

(6) Plans for subsidizing low cost housing with funny money.

(7) Grand schemes for free food, free medicine, free clothing and free housing for the disadvantage but no jobs.

(8) Utopian schemes to ensure security but at the expense of destroying privacy.


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We are messed up, people, and we’re not going to be able to correct it if we don’t know why we are, or what has contributed to the status. A chronic problem is one that keeps slapping us down, we pay it no mind, get back on our feet, proud of our courage, but learning nothing, get slapped down again, then repeating it again and again, ad infinitum.

When a “role model” falls from grace, we are always surprised. Why? Do we think, “There go I but for the grace of God,” or do we say, “Not my problem,” or do we try to imagine the pressures of having to live in the caldron of constant fame? I know what I think. Do you?

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