WHAT ARE YOU LIKE ON THE INSIDE -- LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO YOURSELF!

WHAT ARE YOU LIKE ON THE INSIDE --- LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO YOURSELF!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 14, 2010

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A READER WRITES:

Jim,

Have you read any books by Robert Crais? Here is a quote from THE WATCHMAN:

“With her asleep, Pike believed he was seeing her Original Person. Pike believed each person created himself or herself; you built yourself from the inside out, with the tensions and will of the inside person holding the outside person together. The outside person was the face you showed the world; it was your mask, your camouflage, your message, and, perhaps, your means. It existed only so long as the inside person held it together, and when the inside person could no longer hold the mask together, the outside person dissolved and you would see the original per son. Pike had observed that sleep could sometimes loosen the hold. Booze, dope, and extreme emotions all loosen the hold; the weaker the grasp, the more easily loosened. Then you saw the person within the person. The trick was to reach a place where the inside person and the outside person were the same. The closer someone got to this place, the stronger they would become. Pike believe that Cole was such a person, his inside and outside very close to being one and the same. Pike admired him for it. He also wondered whether Cole had accomplished this through design and effort, or was one with himself because oneness was his natural state. Pike’s inside person had built a fortress. The fortress had served, but Pike hoped for ore. A fortress was a lonely place to live.”

How does this sit with your philosophy?

Mary

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Yes, I have read books by Robert Crais, but not recently.

He is not saying the same thing I am, or in exactly the same way. He is saying, "you build" yourself from the inside out. That is true. Unfortunately, you don't become the person you are from that perspective. You come the person others have told you are from the “outside to the inside” by a cacophony of noises directed at you as stimuli.

Some of us never escape that identity. The irony is the more we deny, “We are like our mother” or “like our father” the more we become so. The more others try to drive “sin” out of us the deeper it buries itself in our unconscious and dictates the puppetry of our lives.

In THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996), I show how necessary rebellion is in establishing authentic identity. Even then, we never escape the scar of our programming and early inculcation.

If a person never rebels, never challenges the laws by which he is judged, then that person is likely to be a pleaser at the expense of ever pleasing him or herself.

We are a society of pleasers because most incentives are directed at pleasing in order to receive the concomitant rewards that pleasing give.

Pleasing is not a zero sum game. It is distorted by a magnitude of from 70 to 90 percent in the direction of those that we would please because no addiction is greater than having others please us. This is the whole mantra of corpocracy.

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Our current economic crisis is proof positive that we live in a world of pleasing others with the puppet masters taking full advantage of this inclination.

I know a bright young lady who is now in the eighth grade who told her father she wanted to be a medical doctor and specialize in pediatrics. His response, “Why would you want to be that? There’s no money in medicine.”

Fortunately, from a very early age, this child has had her own mind and has resisted attempts of others to define her and what she is and isn’t, should and shouldn’t be, so chances are she will go on to reach her career goal of serving others rather than making money, what the puppeteers claim is the most important and most worthy of pursuits.

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When I was in college, there was a boy I knew who loved farming, but his father wanted him to be a dentist where he would have job security. A bright boy, he hated science other than as it related to farming, and hated dentistry even more. He flunked out of school rather than challenge his father’s design for him thus defeating them both.

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The whole idea of the plastic world of buying is to get us to buy something we don’t need but must have because it is marked down “50%” when it could be marked down 100 percent and the company would still make a profit.

We receive constant offers in the mail to sign up for new credit cards which hide the exorbitant interests rates they will charge if we default on any regular bill from electric to water or anything in which we find ourselves slightly in arrears.

But plastic credit cards are a painless way to keep up with the Jones and to buy into the phoniest of all ideas ever perpetrated on the American conscience, “the American Dream!” It is as phony as "diamonds are a girl's best friend." And why? It is not because dreaming is bad or that diamonds are bad, but the disconnect it can make between sense and sensibility, between want and need.

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There has always been a solid silent majority in America now a minority that didn’t need to bother with definitions or ideas about rebellion. I come from that world although have departed from it, the world that has always held America together, connected and real against the extremes of both the East Coast and the West Coast, where nothing is ever real or if real at all not for very long.

That said the happiest, healthiest, most content people are those that you would never know they could rub two dimes together but pay their bills on time, go to church, read the newspaper, vote, and never get a traffic ticket.

They are the heroes of American society yet invisible and disappearing. They are as important a factor to our collective future as is global warming and pollution.

If you do come across them by chance, they are common looking, wholesome, pleasant and draw no attention to themselves. They have most likely worked for forty years at the same job, lived in the same house, keep the house and property neat and tidy, drive a ten-year-old car which is kept in tip top shape, and have no strong opinions on anything.

They are loyal to the things they consider important such as their beliefs and values. And despite all the pressures to the contrary, they raise good kids that go to school to learn, and not to mess around, and then go off to college to become doctors, teachers, scientists, and homemakers, living much as they were raised.

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We could learn so much from them but choose to see them as unsophisticated uninformed even backward and living in the past. In fact, opinion makers would see them as unpatriotic in a consumer driven economy in which people constantly buy things they don’t need such as new high ticket items every year: cars, appliances, furniture, gadgets and the like. Small wonder that sixty-six and two-thirds percent of the Gross Domestic Product depends on spendthrifts.

Most Americans have adequate furniture, adequate living space, live in an adequate house in an adequate neighborhood, have an adequate automobile, but buy into the idea that “this is not good enough for us.” So, they purchase new furniture, new cars, new appliances, and so on.

Companies selling high-ticket items such as furniture and appliances have interest free loans and no payment schedules for 12, 24, or more months, but then BOOM! It all comes due including skyrocketing payments and interest rates.

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We are in a world of pleasers and the puppet masters have taken full advantage of that, as Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate of Economics (2001), points out in his new book FREEFALL (2010).

Stiglitz says only about 58 percent of able body Americans are fully employed in the present economy. Compare this to the published figures of unemployment being around 10 percent.

He also says that the income of Middle Americans from 1999 to 2007 has actually shrunk considerably, while the upper 5 percent has increased in multiples of 100 percent, that the Federal Reserve has been a tool of Wall Street and Big Banks since the end of the longest sustained capitalistic economy in history (1939 - 1989).

Then all hell broke loose. Constraints, regulation and so on were imposed but they might as well been figments of the imagination because they weren’t enforced or even regarded.

Peter Drucker wrote about this in somewhat nostalgic shock when he said, “Up through and immediately after World War Two, executive pay and benefits were modest compared to workers,” but then they shot up until today they can be as high as 10,000 percent higher than workers. What happened?

We have been in a free fall according to Stiglitz due to corporate greed, lack of regulation, incompetence and incapacity of Congress to take appropriate action, ambivalence of the presidency, and a system rigged for corporations to cherry pick to their hearts’ content while taxpayers get the bill.

I take this non sequitur for reason as I hope to show shortly.

* * *

Oneness is the true state when our insides and outsides approximate each other. I have no argument with that. As I’ve attempted to show in my published works, it has not been a trouble free connection when those that would influence us in our early years are so disconnected in their own maturity.

Several years ago on the Johnny Carson Show, Carson asked the late George Carlin why he wore a beard. At the time people who wore beards were persona non grata except in show business. "Well, Johnny," Carlin said in that droll way of his, "my outsides finally caught up with my insides."

Carlin, who was near genius if not so, not only in comedy but also in thinking, had struggled mightily over many things including depression to establish his persona. One of those ways was with facial hair.

Jean Paul Sartre wrote a lot about the "authentic human being," finding few if any in sight. Sartre hit you between the eyes with some of his ideas, whereas his friend Albert Camus brushed you back with the strength of his wit. The two Nobel Laureates (Sartre refused his) thought deeply about being authentic. I have always been a big fan of Sartre, but now am rereading Camus after some fifty years.

I'm currently reading "THE PLAGUE" (1948) by Camus, whereas my friend William L. Livingston wrote a wonderful book called, "THE NEW PLAGUE” (1985).

Livingston’s book doesn’t deal with the same vermin as Camus’s. The new vermin, the new plague according to Livingston, is “complexity." It has signaled the death knell economically for many Americans not to mention people across the globe. And why?

Livingston would say the complexity of our problems is so great that we solve problems we think we can solve leaving the problems we face to exacerbate. Stiglitz would agree.

The author of "FREEFALL" says we've lost our balance between economic resources and human development. "So many of my most gifted students," he says, "have gone into finance instead of medicine, the arts, teaching, science or other necessary and innovative careers, careers that are necessary to ensure growth." Making money ensures no growth only avarice.

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The quote you lifted from Robert Crais's book is another reason I think people should read novels. Novelists can get away with truth telling without turning people off from their primary aim, which is to escape truths and the demands of life for entertainment.

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One final note on the subject of inner and outer health and well being.

As you know, I come from very humble circumstances, and have schooled myself in the best minds that I might come across in libraries and bookstores, finding formal education, although I have had a lot of it, very disappointing in the extreme.

As Emerson had predicted, most learning is through experience and most experience is understood through reading.

On occasion in my life, I have spoken to large groups of learned bodies and have been treated as if I belonged. Most people from such circumstances acquired learning as if by osmosis with large libraries in their homes along with the inculcation of culture, climate and the concomitant privilege that breeding, especially breeding gives to such individuals. Only a privilege few, with notable exceptions, can afford an education that flirts with six figure academic costs per year.

I did not come from such circumstances and yet I have worked with and competed with graduates of such experience. I don't mention this to throw kudos at myself. Quite the contrary.

As author Crais points out in his novel, the outside mask can vanish revealing the inside character behind it. Someone would see evidence of this if I were extremely tired, distressed, overworked, and overwhelmed by the demands of my schedule.

Then my language would break down, my vocabulary would desert me, my grammar and syntax be that of an unschooled person, and I would misuse and mispronounce words. It would be as if I were again that child in the company of my mother, my greatest inspiration and critique, who was very hard of hearing most of her life, and all of mine and she could do a real job on the American language.

That language echoes in my soul and comes out of my mouth when I’m extremely tired. I don’t necessarily fall apart as the character Robert Crais is describing, but I do become totally transparent. Knowing this, understanding this, has humbled me to appreciate how lucky I am to express myself knowing who and what I really am.

Be always well, and Happy St. Valentine’s Day!

Jim