LESSONS LEARNED -- THE CROOKED TIMBER OF A LIFE

LESSONS LEARNED – THE CROOKED TIMBER OF A LIFE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 11, 2010

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“Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be built.”

Immanuel Kant (1724 -1804), German philosopher

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REFERENCE:

A reader was moved to comment on my missive, “Eccentricities of Values (July 6, 2010). It caused me to reflect on some of the lessons I’ve learned in my long life.

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A WRITER WRITES:

Dr Jim,

I appreciate receiving and reading, and thinking about your missives, some more than others. I would like your comment and opinion on something.

I have just finished reading a book called, "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn. Are you familiar with him or his book?

Many of the things he wrote about I already knew, of course, but not so much all together.

Our free society gives an opportunity for a few who are talented, work hard, dedicated and lucky to move up the ladder, we know that, but our society basically holds the common people down and under control, fighting each other over crumbs, while the rich and powerful keep and take the cake and frosting. The cards are stacked and whether one is republican or democrat, it doesn't matter but a little.

Thanks,

Dick

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Dick,

Thank you for your comment. I am familiar with the works of historian Howard Zinn. I find them and him refreshing. You may have seen him on CSPAN discussing his works.

As to society holding common people down, it is worthy of examination. Remarkable patterns do surface over time. It would seem whatever the social, economic or political system, ninety percent do, indeed, follow and ten percent lead. The distribution of wealth appears to follow a similar pattern. Now, why is that?

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This was true of the feudal system. Monarchs and lords ruled and serfs lived at their behest. The Roman Catholic Church, far from discouraging this pattern, appeared in league with royalty from the fourth century on.

The Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century appeared to break this pattern. The economic force became known as “the Protestant work ethic.” This gave rise to a mercantile class and a capitalistic economy.

Again, ninety percent of the people were working class engaged as craftsmen or unskilled laborers. They worked in guilds but were controlled by the ten percent.

The Industrial Revolution energized by the American Civil War failed to change this ratio. In fact, ninety percent of the people, including children as young as eight and nine-years-old were part of the labor force.

Marx and Engel thought to change this. The Soviet Socialistic Republic rose out of “The Communist Manifesto” of dialectical materialism. Once again, however, it failed to change the mathematics.

In modern free democratic capitalistic society, ninety percent of the people remain essentially subjugated to the ten percent ruling class in such roles as moneychangers, industrialists and politicians.

Whatever the system, temporary breaks from the 90-10 ratio have been few and far between and seldom sustainable. The American middle working class that rose out of WWII has sputtered and faltered in the new century.

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This rather rigid formula has been a lifelong interest of mine having risen out of the lower middle class. I have no special crystal ball, and certainly could be wrong in my views, but certain lessons have been learned in my twisted life of working and living on four continents over the past half-century. I share them with you now given this caveat:

(1) God played a trick on us. He gave us all a brain. People who rule have no more brains than people who are ruled.

From the beginning of time, when man was a hunter and gatherer through the period of cultivating the land as farmer and establishing a place and space to exist, hierarchies have been created to differentiate leaders from the led.

The “Divine Right of Kings” was a clever muse conjured up by monarchs, but no more clever than the infallibility of ecclesiastical authority of the Roman Catholic Church, not to mention the infallibility of our present day institutions.

(2) The ruling class’s disposition for power has never diminished.

For centuries, monarchs could neither read nor write, nor make simple calculations. They relied on scribes and technicians. The Roman Catholic Church gravitated to the role of prime provider of this service. It cemented church power. The Church crowned emperors up to the time of Napoleon. Napoleon crowned himself.

Church and State have clashed over power ever since, not only in the East but in the West as well.

(3) The great religions and secular powers of state have had a stormy history.

We see this in Islam countries today. The Catholic Church gravitated to dominance of the indigenous peoples of the Americas half a millennium ago. This has, if anything reinforced the 90-10 ratio there. The most impoverished places on the globe find religion dominant.

(4) Over the past hundred years, corporate society has come to dominate the Western world.

Corporate society is the chief export of the West to the East. We see this in such places as communist China, Islam Indonesia, and quasi-democratic India.

Corporate society is not exactly a perpetuation of the “Divine Rights of the Kings,” but operates with the same infallibility and impunity, or essentially as a law unto itself.

Ten percent in corporate society call the shots and if those shots misfire the ninety percent suffer.

The scribes and technicians of the heyday of monarchies are the professionals of corporate society today.

The corporate ruling class grew out of the mercantile class. My wonder is how the professional class will evolve.

Currently, the professional class is as passive as the blue-collar working class. Blue-collar workers, who rose out of the pre-industrial guilds, once controlled their work, set up their own workstations, and measured their own performance. Unions gave up worker control of work for wages and benefits. There is evidence professionals are falling into this same pattern.

The irony is professionals are indispensable to enterprise, and those calling the shots in management are not.

(5) The mentality of the individual, and we live in an individualistic society, is to seek comfort not challenge, to find our niche and seek security, to ignore the changes that are obviously happening and to leave the future up for grabs.

It is said we use ten percent of our brains. If that is true, whose fault is that?

We live in a free society with ample opportunity to stretch ourselves. Why do so many of us fail to do so? Does the system discourage stepping out of our place and space? What do you think?

Stepping out of our place and space means questioning all the things we have been programmed to believe to be so. If we are in a cage of our programming, who put us in that cage? The short answer is we did. The longer answer is that we are all fighting our way out of that cage, which means challenging our programming.

We all live in cages mainly of our own making. The evidence? We gravitated to people like ourselves who live in similar cages. We find diversion in substances and diversions that diminish us, or we look for trouble, which makes the cage only more confining.

(6) Escape, even when successful, is never total.

The programmed child in us never dies. Moreover, the roots we first put down follow us like a shadow.

Education can be a key to escape from the cage, but no guarantee. A more oppressive cage may be that of celebrity, wealth, power, influence, knowledge or fame, as identity becomes more contrived and less genuine as we compare and compete to a laudatory audience.

It is a wise person that stays humble.

There is a danger when you leave the ninety percent and become part of the ten percent. You can forget your roots. We see this when working stiffs are promoted to positions of authority in corporate society.

(7) Where we are and what we are doing is likely to be where we expect to be doing what we expect to do.

Most of us cannot see ourselves otherwise engaged. Most of us allow circumstances to dictate our destiny.

Only one percent of little boys who love athletics make it as professional athletes. Yet, over fifty percent of fathers and mothers who become professional athletes have sons and daughters who do so as well. Several generations of a family may find themselves making a living as professional athletes. For example, there are three brothers in Major League Baseball this season from the same family.

Less than ten percent of all people who write books make a living at it, yet fathers and mothers who become writers often find their sons and daughters making a successful living as writers. Why is that?

There is, of course, the matter of genetics, the matter of professional climate in the home, and expectation of that possibility. There are also the social and professional connections. The opportunity to showcase talent is not without its obstacles for the unconnected.

It also helps to have a model and mentor. My uncle was the first member of my extended family to graduate from college. He also acquired two Ph.D.’s in the process. More than a generation later, I was the second to graduate from college, and only the second to acquire a Ph.D. in my extended family in the past one hundred years. Now several members of my extended family are college graduates, but no Ph.D.’s. There is a sprinkling of a priest or two, and a nun or two as well, but you would expect that in an Irish family.

(8) Life is a matter of choices.

Many of us allow others to make choices for us believing they know better than we do what is best for us. Often, we are disappointed, which drives us deeper into the cage of our bitterness.

We live in a culture meant to please others, which is often at the expense of pleasing ourselves.

We live in a culture in which we are more inclined to worry about what others think of us than what we think of ourselves.

We live in a culture, which expects us to love others without first being loving of ourselves.

We live in a conflicting culture in which we are expected to accept others as they are but to be suspect of ourselves.

It is impossible to be truly tolerant of others if we are not first tolerant of ourselves. Most of our bitterness towards others is only the tip of the iceberg compared to programmed self-contempt.

(9) We live in a culture of compare and compete, which is destroying us.

Imitation may be the highest form of flattery, but it is at the expense of developing our innate talent. If we are to compete, we might best compete at bringing out the best that is in us.

(10) Most of what we know and believe to be true is second hand information.

Television 24-hour news service and the Internet compete now with newspapers, books and magazines.

Education from grammar school through college is essentially boilerplate second hand information. We are not taught to think but to regurgitate.

Smart people are judged on the basis of credentials and eloquence, not on how the information computes with our experience.

We measure intelligence on the basis of grades, IQ, SAT and GRE scores, all products of second hand information.

The boilerplate of life is experience. It is a more reliable index. The purpose of our life is what we do. Intelligence is not what it “is,” but what intelligence does. The doing of intelligence is in the crucible of experience.

(11) The more we are other-directed and other regulated, the less we are self-directed and self-regulated.

As a consequence, we are less likely to own what we do and therefore be motivated to contributed meaningfully. Work can become a dreg, life a bore with motivation to change the situation running in neutral or locked in the negative.

(12) The more we do for others the less they will be inclined to do for themselves.

This weakens them and their resolve to take control while diminishing them as individuals.

(13) Structure of organizational life is necessary to diminish chaos and confusion.

Structure is always accompanied by culture. If the structure and culture are wrong for you to thrive, then you are in the wrong place and space. You best correct the situation posthaste by getting out of there.

The wrong place and space could apply to a relationship, to a school, a job, company, or community. What is right for others may be wrong for you. This is not meant to suggest that little aggravations justify considering radical options. It means that you be your own best friend by optimizing your health and happiness with due consideration.

(14) The best strategy in a failing job or relationship is retreat, reassessment and redeployment.

To struggle impossible odds to make a point or show your courage to endure pain is ill advised. The justification for being in a failing job or relationship is part of our cage construction and can lead to tragic circumstances.

(15) Much as psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists claim that people change the evidence in experiential terms is quite the contrary.

We are essentially the same person at 55 that we were at 35 at 15 or younger. If you examine your life over time, you will see a pattern of triumphs and tragedies, successes and failures as if you were reading a novel.

It may seem that we are lock stepping to our destiny, but we need not. We can modify this continuum with a change of climate, circumstance, culture, society, place and space.

(16) For the past one hundred years, the dominant wisdom was that managers led and workers worked; managers planned, organized, directed and controlled, and workers executed.

Work has changed radically from muscle power to brainpower. Despite this, there has been little change in this equation.

Productive work in advanced societies has turned upside down. If anything, management has become a liability rather than asset to performance.

(17) We learn late and often imperfectly what is in our best interests.

We need structure and culture to function effectively, but we also need a better relationship between thinking and doing, believing and valuing, directing and controlling. Work has become as spontaneous as play, while play has become as become as arduous as work once was.

(18) For the past one hundred years, we have effectively made the worker more passive, more reactive, more indolent and adolescent, more suspended in this adolescence, programmed in learned helplessness with a dependency on management for direction and control, and a counterdependency on the organization for the total well being of the worker.

This has proven toxic to the health of workers, work and the workplace, and by extension, the community and the country. Many of our social and economic problems can be traced to this toxicity.

(19) The failure of workers to grow up and behave as responsible adults has had more social, economic, political and psychological impact on society than any other single factor.

(20) We cannot reverse this one hundred year progression with some academic modality or revolutionary paradigm.

It will be a long process of voluntary change in retreat from the status quo and business as usual, from hierarchical authority, infallible institutional rigidity to a more open, accessible, vulnerable and self-correcting configuration conducive to collaboration, cooperation and contribution.

(21) We cannot change the 90-10 ratio overnight, but we can over the next hundred years.

We can do this by increase parity between vertical thinking and horizontal or lateral thinking.

We are an irrational as well as rational society, intuitive thinkers as well as cognitive thinkers, guided by nonlinear reasoning as well as linear logic.

We like to think we are problem solvers but we are problem controllers.

Problems are never solved only controlled. We arrest problems in their tracks to be haunted with them another day.

We are trained hindsight thinkers. It is why crisis management is our chief problem solving activity. This finds us solving problems with the same thinking that caused them, spinning our wheels in the madness and metrics of circular logic.

We are capable of foresight and creative engagement but are not so programmed. Creative thinking is discouraged in a close, infallible, hierarchically structured climate, which now prevails.

(22) We are a victim of chronology at the expense of our psychology.

We look at our circumstances and say, it is too early or too late to change. It is too early or too late to learn new skills. It is too early or too late to change careers. It is too early or too late to change our relationships. It is too early or too late to change our lifestyle. It is too early or too late to do anything.

I went back to graduate school for six years year around when I was in my late thirties. I had been previously told it was too early for me to retire in my mid-thirties, but too late at the end of my thirties to seek a Ph.D.

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Circumstances often find us stuck in a rut difficult to negotiate. Yet, even then we have a choice to make: do nothing or do something.

There is nothing wrong with a person being in the same place and space for forty or more years if that place and space is fulfilling and energizing. I am not writing to that person. I am writing to the person, for whatever reason, feels stymied, closed off, stultified and concerned.

It is not our fault for finding ourselves in this culture, climate and structure. That said my intention is not to take us off the hook but to provoke some action to do something.

Corporate society will too pass away as have social and economic systems of the past, but then as now, it starts with the individual. That is prevailing idea in my lessons learned.

Be always well,

Jim

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