OBAMA, NIETZSCHE'S UBERMENSCH, and the PERCEPTIVE VOICE OF WILLIAM L. LIVINGSTON IV!

OBAMA, NIETZSCHE’S UBERMENSCH, and the PERCEPTIVE VOICE OF WILLIAM L. LIVINGSTON IV!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 7, 2010

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President Barak Hussein Obama not only broke through the color barrier and the miscegenation bias having been born of a white American mother and an African father to become president, he personified Nietzsche’s Ubermensch.

Like Thomas Jefferson before him, he has been declared the undisputed smartest man in the room whatever the company. He has the golden tongue of the evangelist and spoke to voters some twenty months ago as if they were thinking adults, electrifying young people on the Internet to support him with their legs and coin.

If this is not astounding enough, he is one of the few presidents capable of writing his own books, books that have been best sellers not on the basis of his celebrity, but on the basis of his literary intellectual gifts.

He embodies Nietzsche’s idea of the Ubermensch (the super-man, or overman) because he appears to transcend the limits of human capacities, to be devoid of human timidity, and to aspire to confidence without sentimentality or apology.

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Day has already turned to night for the Obama administration after only 20 months. Nietzsche can help us understand why.

Nietzsche makes of the Ubermensch in THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA (1883), “Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman” with a will to power. He claims men always fall short of the mark because they are all too human. The Ubermensch represents strength and courage, nobility and style, and the refinement that blinds men to their own weaknesses and those of others, which inevitably leads to false steps.

WHY HAS PRESIDENT OBAMA FALLEN SHORT?

Nietzsche wasn’t speaking of deliverance with his Ubermensch, but of a regulatory ideal, something to aspire to, not a concrete prescription for transformative behavior.

He lived before the age of celebrity and Hollywood and superheroes. Yet he understood the ideal type, people created and packaged to fulfill our messianic dreams by dazzling us with rhetoric and riveting promises.

It was mood enough to get Obama elected but then he fill into the quagmire of Afghanistan, the economic meltdown, mounting unemployment, the BP oil spill, and the train wreck of congressional politics.

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These are incidental symptoms and real causes. All problems emanate from culture.

Obama ascended to occupy his presidency in a culture obsessed with credentials, preoccupied with experts with the appropriate university tags and distinguished awards. Clout factor is a product of inclusion.

It is a world stuck in the world of the Ubermensch, caught up in the petty cycles of defensiveness and revenge, enslaved to a morality without the will to transcend it.

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By a peculiar set of circumstances, Jonathan Alter, an Obama apologist, manages to confirm many of William L. Livingston’s premises of institutional failure with his book, THE PROMISE: PRESIDENT OBAMA, YEAR ONE (2010)

Livingston, with perhaps the keenest mind and sharpest tongue in an age marked by intellectual faint-heartedness, is a mass of contradictions.

Dedicated to the ideals of rationality and common sense in his DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010), he approaches the irrational in his contempt for institutional failures to live up to the ideals that purportedly drive him. Supportive of natural law and pure reason, he possesses one of the clearest and most direct styles I have encountered in the English language. The subtleties of his ironies are consequently easily misunderstood.

Jonathan Swift was also such a man.

He was a political polemicist who created GULLIVER’S TRAVELS (1726) that has become a children’s classic today. Livingston addresses professional engineers in DESIGN FOR PREVENTION, and may have created the dialectic to appreciate the challenges of the twenty-first century, politically and socially, and beyond.

Evidence of Livingston’s perceptive voice is confirmed in the pages of Alter’s THE PROMISE.

As Alter observes, FDR was considered to have a second-class intellect but a first-rate temperament. Obama is considered to have a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. Livingston says that is not even relevant much less enough. It is what you do with what you have not what you are.

Alter can’t say enough about how smart and sane Obama is, or how spectacular his potential.

This is not in evidence in Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan, his woeful record in job creation, or his ambivalence towards Wall Street. Finance Reform has passed but its efficacy won’t be apparent for years.

Obama comes off as aloof, not politically savvy, prolix and lackluster as salesman for his own policies. He likes to consider himself above sound bites. Without sound bites, Alter writes, Obama’s speeches have amounted to “fast food that left you hungry again soon after the meal.”

Livingston would say the logjam could be avoided by not worrying about style points in an oratory debate but to focus on process consequences.

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Obama has been victimized by his assumed over confidence. His “woo” power. Livingston would say, and Alter confirms, his greatest flaw is not this but his leadership, and it has to do with his executive team. If it is more than five members, it ceases to be effective. It becomes a hierarchy, and hierarchies have to defend their infallibility.

This flaw has been visible from the start with Obama's infatuation with the virtues of the American meritocracy. It, of course, led to his rise. Read DESIGN FOR PREVENTION to appreciate how hard Livingston hits the idea that “cream rises to the top.” On the contrary, he believes anything of value in an organization rises from the troops in the trenches.

It is not the status seekers, not the pyramid climbers filling all appropriate boxes for promotion, or those having the most prestigious university credentials that make the difference. Livingston argues it is the teamwork of equals in a flat organization that is the hallmark of achievement. It is people with the integrity to define problems, and then tackle them, people not caged in cognitive biases, or crippled by fear of acting outside accepted protocol.

Obama hired what he calls “broad-gauged integrative thinkers who can both absorb huge loads of complex material and apply it practically and lucidly without resorting to off-putting jargon.”

Livingston would see such thinkers trapped in hindsight attractors, persistently engaging complexity when it would be wiser to circumvent it with foresight thinking.

Alter described Obama’s concept of team:

“Almost all had advanced degrees from Ivy League schools, proof that they had aced standardized tests and knew the shortcuts to success exploited by American elites. A few were bombastic, but most had learned to cover their faith in their own powers of analysis with a thin veneer of humility; it made their arguments more effective. But their faith in the power of analysis remained unshaken.”

Livingston hits this fallacy with directness:

“An institution emphasizes its past into a barstool and then sits on it."

That is to say it goes nowhere.

Institutional infallibility is on display in Alter’s paragraph. Standardized tests measure hindsight thinking, or what is already known, giving no clue that test-taking athletes can think cogently. As for analysis, it is the problem not the answer. Synthesis is the answer.

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We live in a culture of “the best and the brightest.” Tune in any day of the week when Charlie Rose has a guest on his PBS TV program, and you will hear the comment of how smart someone is, as if this is the measure of anything.

Obama’s administrative team, as well as executive teams across corpocracy, has fallen into this trap.

What is sad to report is that as sophisticated and smart as these people are chances are none of them are aware that the trap exists or that they are in it.

For instance, during the oil spill crisis, Obama’s team kept reminding the public that the energy secretary, Steven Chu, was a Nobel Laureate. In other words, credentials, especially such impressive credentials could override any doubt that the administration was on top of the problem, which clearly it wasn’t.

This misplaced faith in the “best and the brightest” has been with us since the Kennedy administration. It has coalesced around hindsight thinking, apology, the blame game, and business as usual.

Obama, to put it bluntly, suffers from cultural class myopia. He buys into institutional infallibility, the dogma of its authority, its glittering significance orchestrated by its own self-aggrandizement. He is a product of its design. Livingston writes:

“Infallibility is the backbone and prime directive of the institution and its defense is esteemed the primary personal value, by necessity.”

Alter writes:

“Obama has surrounded himself with the best credentialed most brilliant policy mandarins he could find, even if almost none of them knew anything about what it was like to work in small business, manufacturing, real estate, or other parts of the real economy.”

That was not part of the drill. Livingston supports an open system where failures are allowed so successes can occur, where workers are self-regulated and obedient to the integrity of the work they are pursuing and not loyal to any arbitrary standards.


One of the great systemic failures, Livingston points out, is conformity to an institutional culture. Obama didn’t invent such a culture, but he has become a defender of it by his selection process. He has been disinclined to select people outside the Washington Beltway, people inclined to think outside the box.

Alter writes:

“It’s hard not to wonder if much more would have been accomplished, both substantively and politically, had Obama’s economic principals, Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, been more open to ideas not of their own authorship and more capable of playing with others, including a public that still hardly knows either of them. Obama apparently never considered appointing a banker or Fed governor from outside the East Coast.”

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A homogenous team of same thinking same social class and same intellectual orientation magnifies weaknesses, and narrows the perspective to the reification of the known. Alter adds, Obama’s team “all knew one another and all looked at the world through nearly identical eyes.” Small wonder they have been constantly blindsided by unexpected events.

Obama appears to be blinded in another sense. Geithner has impeccable credentials but his serial income tax delinquencies should have red flagged him as not suited for Secretary of Treasury.

Stanley McChystal should never have been elevated to command of Afghanistan operations after being responsible for the cover-up of Pat Tillman’s death due to friendly fire.

Lawrence Summers’s Machiavellian attempt to exclude the input of Paul Volcker on economic matters was compounded by his blocking of Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Alan Binder from conferencing with the president in the Oval Office. This should have been enough to fire him. But that did not happen.

This disconnection finds Obama imprisoned within the Summers-Geithner group, which Alter says, makes it “increasingly difficult for him to see beyond its borders.”

Alter blames this whole charade on America’s love affair with experts. Expertise justifies and perpetuates the infallibility of institutions, the primacy of citadels of meritocracy, which has gone beyond sustaining a culture to creating a cult.

These institutions of analysis and hindsight thinking have mesmerized our president into believing that with enough analysis the right answers are sure to surface.

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It is not a question of sincerity of the president or of authors Alter or Livingston. It is a question of insight and the knowledge to go forward. I find it difficult to understand why Livingston is not part of the dialogue. I go to bed now after writing this all night wondering this until sleep comes to me.

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