WHY DO WE BEAT UP ON OUR PRESIDENTS AND ELECTED POLITICIANS SO MUCH?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 31, 2010 (HALLOWEEN)
* * *
In 1964, I was a young manager in the Industrial Division of Nalco Chemical Company. I was a very active lad which was somewhat foreign to my disposition: Secretary of the Zoning Board of Lawrence Township of Marion County (Indianapolis), on the Executive Board of Power Engineering, member of the American Chemical Association, columnist for the Lawrence Township newspaper, contributor to the Catholic Messenger, and chairman of the Young Republicans of Marion county.
It was in that role that I dined and discussed politics with Republican candidates for the House of Representative, Senate, Governor, and the candidacy of Barry Goldwater for President of the United States. Senator Goldwater’s son came to head up a rally we had for him, along with a series of appearances across the country. Alas, I did not meet his father.
It was in that climate that I experienced a sense of how brutal politics can be, how irrational and mendacious. People around me thought the world would go to hell if Lyndon Baines Johnson was elected president, while the nimble vice president and now president (due to the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy) was claiming Goldwater would create a nuclear holocaust in Vietnam.
The scare tactics worked. Johnson won in a landslide.
Looking now, a half-century later, that time was child’s play compared to today. It was, however, very much like Halloween during the whole campaign with the attendant vitriolic, ghoulish, macabre and morbid caricatures of the “enemy’s list,” which was those running for office of the other party.
The thing I remember most about these candidates was that sitting across from them in someone’s house in the kitchen having a cup of coffee they invariably dropped their scary masks and were decent human beings. But once out on the stump, their sleeping Frankenstein rose out of their bowles with fire in their eyes and hot air out of their mouths.
In that sense, if anything, fifty years has seen this disposition of the satanic and the saintly transmogrify into the grotesque. After the extended Halloween of mid-term elections next Tuesday, November 2, 2010, new bodies and many old will fill the House of Representatives and the Senate, but otherwise, it will seem as if nothing has changed. So much for spending a half billion dollars on political campaigning in our democracy. So late we are smart.
* * *
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. is an industrial and organizational psychologist writing in the genre of organizational psychology, author of Confident Selling, Work Without Managers, The Worker, Alone, Six Silent Killers, Corporate Sin, Time Out for Sanity, Meet Your New Best Friend, Purposeful Selling, In the Shadow of the Courthouse and Confident Thinking and Confidence in Subtext. A Way of Thinking About Things, Who Put You in a Cage, and Another Kind of Cruelty are in Amazon’s KINDLE Library.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Thursday, October 28, 2010
WHAT YOU SAY SPEAKS SO LOUDLY I CANNOT HEAR YOU -- FRONTLINE: OCTOBER 26, 2010: THE SPILL
WHAT YOU SAY SPEAKS SO LOUDLY I CANNOT HEAR YOU – FRONTLINE OCTOBER 26, 2010: THE SPILL
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 28, 2010
* * *
FRONTLINE is a television public affairs program. You watch it. You see BP executives’ parade by along with other oil company executives. You get a glimpse into Congressional hearings as minor theatre.
The hearings remind you of when your father took you out to the woodshed to give you a beating. He feigned the performance with you cooperating by yelling in pain for those up at the house thinking you got your just do. Congressional hearings are a similar charade of complicity.
* * *
The program was not limited to the April 20, 2010 oilrig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, or the subsequent horrors of millions of gallons of crude contaminating the Gulf and its ecosystem putting thousands out of work, but covered a broader spectrum of BP insolence and ineptitude.
FRONTLINE also covered the fire and explosion at the Texas City Refinery on March 23, 2005 where 15 workers were killed and 17 injured. Lawsuits of that disaster continue to this day.
The program in addition covered the Prudhoe Bay pipeline leak of some 267,000 US gallons into 1.9 areas of land in Alaska on March 2, 2006. The fortunate aspect of this spill was that it was in the winter. It did not get into the ecosystem, and was successfully recovered.
* * *
ALL TOO HUMAN
The viewer of this program sees Chairman of the Board of British Petroleum, Lord John Brown, taking on the multiple personality of Caligula. At first, we see him as noble, moderate and engaged as he pontificates his vision of the BP Empire.
He is viewed in seminar with his minions, whom he sees as “turtles,” like obedient Ninja Turtles. Then we see him becoming increasingly detached and irritated after a series of BP disasters, only to retreat into the sanctuary of his arrogance until the BP Board clips his wings plunging him into the perversity of schadenfreude. Yes, the program hints at a scandal.
He steps down and his curly headed best boy Ninja Turtle, Tony Hayward, steps into the breach. We see Sir Tony again in seminar addressing his Ninja Turtles on how safety and security are going to be the watchwords of his watch. No sooner said then there is the oilrig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico.
* * *
These upper class public school boys know how to talk but not necessarily how to walk the talk. Hayward, a disarmingly charming little fellow, seems always to want to be somewhere else definitely out of the frame. He confirms this when he complains to reporters about the incessant demands on him, “I want to get my life back.” That remark blew up in his face.
* * *
In viewing the Brown and Hayward appearances before Congressional hearings, you get the distinct impression they feel bored and exasperated by having to tolerate such inane questions from such a mediocre panel.
Hayward, I suspect largely because of his insouciance, is relieved of control and sent back to England to join his mates at his yacht club and sailing regatta.
In steps the tall blond American, who once ran AMOCO, Robert Dudley. He assumes a low profile until the well is capped. Then, surprisingly, he starts making like this is not all BP’s fault, adding self-indulgence to the BP executive profile.
* * *
As these men paraded across the television screen, I thought of Nietzsche’s “all too human,” men charged with major responsibilities unable to escape their collective pettiness, failing not only to act as managers but even less as leaders. They pranced, prowled, postured and pouted, as I would imagine Nero and Napoleon once did. They are the prototype of what constitutes leadership today. And they are legion in every aspect of American society. They are also the one percent earning up to fifty percent of our collective wealth. We wonder why we are having problems.
* * *
WHEN A WHISPER BECOMES A SHOUT
Such men as Brown, Haywood and Dudley can be imagined sitting together with their minions coming up with the strategy, “We have to cut costs by twenty-five percent across the board.”
This is whispered in conference but shouted into the heavens at operational levels across the globe.
Top management whispers its short-range thinking and the die is cast across the corporate world to its remotest parts. No one thinks of unintended consequences. Expediency rules. That means what is most career enhancing and will cause the least fuss is followed. Union workers won’t be touched but vulnerable professionals without clout will be dispatched.
The greatest savings, however, will be found in operations by cutting back on maintenance, engineering, research, training and development, safety and security. BP has been doing precisely this for years.
(1) At Prudhoe Bay, they cut back on running a pig through the pipelines to remove corrosion and interference, and in some cases quit the process altogether. In addition, they quit hiring highly qualified inspectors in the field and put unqualified people into the jobs to show they had an inspection corps. Moreover, repairs and maintenance were cut back.
(2) The Texas City Oil Refinery was in start-up mode and its isomerization unit malfunctioned. A tower began to fill with gasoline, overflowed, and the excess gasoline flowed into a back up unit, which overflowed sending a geyser of gasoline into the air with a tremendous explosion. Operations were in risk denial with risk blinders on, as the instrumentation meant to monitor and prevent this from happening had not been repaired.
(3) A hurricane hit an oilrig but did not cause damage to this forty-story tower. The collapse of two stanchions was due to a valve meant to discharge water in such an emergency. It had been installed backwards taking on water instead leading to the collapse.
(4) The oilrig in the Gulf of Mexico failed to use the proper mud and cylinder protection for the well. Maintenance procedures had been cut back or abandoned as part of the twenty-five percent cost reduction program. When Tony Hayward was asked about mud and cylinder protection, he claimed total ignorance as if that was not part of his job. “That’s operations.”
* * *
It is easy to point fingers at BP executives as if this cost cutting business was an isolated case, which it isn’t. The pressure to be profitable results too often in putting profits before people, and shareholders before good sense.
(1) The Prudhoe Bay disaster could have been avoided with a $100,000 investment, instead it cost millions;
(2) The Texas City Oil Refinery disaster could have been avoided with an investment of $1 million, instead it cost tens of millions;
(3) The faulty installation of the discharge valve for the oilrig in the hurricane could have been nothing; instead it cost millions to get the rig operating again;
(4) The oilrig disaster in the Gulf could have been avoided by following maintenance procedures for about $1 million; instead it is costing tens of billions of dollars and irrevocable damage to the ecosystem and the economic stability of the region.
* * *
LIVINGSTON HAS IT RIGHT
William L. Livingston IV, author of DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010), addresses the problems of organizational bondage with insight, penetrating logic, and courageous indifference to sacred cows.
He recognizes the flaws of institutional society, its infallibility and inability to learn from its mistakes much less its excesses. He sees management in its present iteration as an obstacle to progress. And he sees education from our most esteemed institutions to the common denominator of primary and secondary education in rigid conformity to hindsight thinking.
Livingston is an engineer, and the society that we all enjoy is the product of engineering. It has taken the science of research and developed that science into products and services that have created modernity.
One wonders if his book might find a different audience than the one he seeks. That was true of Jonathan Swift and his “Gulliver Travels” (1726). It was meant as a political satire aimed at the English people, and became a children’s classic. I sense that Livingston’s work meant for engineers surviving in a litigious climate might become a social commentary of our times.
* * *
THE WORLD IS LEAVING THE UNITED STATES BEHIND
From 1950 to 1980, it was said, as the United States goes, so goes the world. That was my era. It was also the time when a world decimated by World War Two in which tens of millions lost their lives. It was a world hungry for American products and services.
It was easy for a poor boy to get an education, to rise in the corporation, and to experience a privileged existence that was new in his family’s history. Detroit ruled and the big three automakers created the working middleclass by generous pay and benefits. Companies across the nation emulated Detroit.
Organizations grew fat and lazy with as many as twelve levels of management when there had only been three during the war. Public schools, public transportation, public parks and libraries, public recreation centers, public highways, bridges, dams and millions of miles of railroad tracks made mobility a common experience.
Working class philosopher Eric Hoffer once said, “The difference between the United States and the rest of the world is maintenance.” He was referring to how well kept our infrastructure, and how dedicated we were to excellence.
* * *
The last thirty years, 1980 to 2010, have seen much of the American dream, upward mobility, and being better off then our parents fade. Stability has given way to flux, confidence to fear, moderation to greed. Manners have given way to vulgarity, trust to deception, ambition to short cuts, and education from enlightenment to job training.
* * *
Alas, President Barak Obama has had the misfortune to come into office when the United States economy is shrinking for the first time in sixty years. Globalization and the technological revolution are the culprits in this tectonic shift, but many prefer to focus on Obama’s place of birth, religion and loyalty rather than the reality that drives our times.
We like to think of the United States as the lone Super Power, as No. 1, challenging anyone who would suggest otherwise. Rome was once in our shoes, so was Great Britain, and now it appears to be our turn to decline.
* * *
Thomas Friedman discusses in his column today (October 28, 2010) a report headed by Charles M. Vest, formerly MIT president, titled “Gathering Storm.” The report concludes, “In spite of the efforts of both those in government and the private sector, the outlook for America to compete for quality jobs has further deteriorated in the past five years.” Here are some US rankings:
(1) Sixth in global innovation-based competitiveness;
(2) Fortieth in rate of change over the last decade;
(3) Eleventh among industrialized nations in the fraction of 25-to-34-year-olds who have graduated from high school;
(4) Sixteenth in college completion rate;
(5) Twenty-second in broadband Internet access;
(6) Twenty-fourth in life expectancy at birth;
(7) Twenty-seventh among developed nations in proportion of college students receiving degrees in science and engineering;
(8) Forty-eighth in quality K-12 math and science education;
Friedman writes:
“A dysfunctional political system is one that knows the right answers but can’t even discuss them rationally, let alone act on them, and one that devotes vastly more attention to cable TV preachers than to recommendations by the best scientists and engineers.”
* * *
We like comfort food, comfort lifestyles, comfort information, and comfortable demands placed on us. Comfort was an unknown luxury to anyone born in the 1930s of modest circumstance.
My generation when young could look back and remember bread and unemployment lines. We accepted the fact that we had no safety net; nobody to bail us out if we got into trouble because nobody we knew had any money or influence. We gutted it out. Some of us got lucky, and got an education and rode the 1950s to the 1980s with relative ease.
Looking back, we now feel blessed. There is a strange sense of freedom when you know it is all up to you. There were, of course, distractions but nothing compared to what there are now. There were temptations, again, but nothing compared to today. It is perhaps impossible for young people to understand how puritanical were social constraints.
The main difference was the world was thought to be America’s oyster and we behaved according to that inflated confidence. The last thirty years (1980 to 2010) have given Americans the feeling that the world is running on another track.
Double-digit unemployment (9.6 unemployment is a myth) could be with us for another generation or more. We still glory in our press clippings, in our celebrity while our healthcare costs are more than most other advanced societies but inferior in delivery. Our education is more expensive than other advanced societies and as “Gathering Storm” shows leaving something to be desired.
The irony is that other Third World countries such as China and India are now competing with us not only economically but also in terms of obesity and associated diseases with obesity. We have exported our appetites but not our modesty and discipline. So, I think Friedman is wrong to blame government alone. This is much bigger than government. It is the idea that once was America.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 28, 2010
* * *
FRONTLINE is a television public affairs program. You watch it. You see BP executives’ parade by along with other oil company executives. You get a glimpse into Congressional hearings as minor theatre.
The hearings remind you of when your father took you out to the woodshed to give you a beating. He feigned the performance with you cooperating by yelling in pain for those up at the house thinking you got your just do. Congressional hearings are a similar charade of complicity.
* * *
The program was not limited to the April 20, 2010 oilrig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, or the subsequent horrors of millions of gallons of crude contaminating the Gulf and its ecosystem putting thousands out of work, but covered a broader spectrum of BP insolence and ineptitude.
FRONTLINE also covered the fire and explosion at the Texas City Refinery on March 23, 2005 where 15 workers were killed and 17 injured. Lawsuits of that disaster continue to this day.
The program in addition covered the Prudhoe Bay pipeline leak of some 267,000 US gallons into 1.9 areas of land in Alaska on March 2, 2006. The fortunate aspect of this spill was that it was in the winter. It did not get into the ecosystem, and was successfully recovered.
* * *
ALL TOO HUMAN
The viewer of this program sees Chairman of the Board of British Petroleum, Lord John Brown, taking on the multiple personality of Caligula. At first, we see him as noble, moderate and engaged as he pontificates his vision of the BP Empire.
He is viewed in seminar with his minions, whom he sees as “turtles,” like obedient Ninja Turtles. Then we see him becoming increasingly detached and irritated after a series of BP disasters, only to retreat into the sanctuary of his arrogance until the BP Board clips his wings plunging him into the perversity of schadenfreude. Yes, the program hints at a scandal.
He steps down and his curly headed best boy Ninja Turtle, Tony Hayward, steps into the breach. We see Sir Tony again in seminar addressing his Ninja Turtles on how safety and security are going to be the watchwords of his watch. No sooner said then there is the oilrig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico.
* * *
These upper class public school boys know how to talk but not necessarily how to walk the talk. Hayward, a disarmingly charming little fellow, seems always to want to be somewhere else definitely out of the frame. He confirms this when he complains to reporters about the incessant demands on him, “I want to get my life back.” That remark blew up in his face.
* * *
In viewing the Brown and Hayward appearances before Congressional hearings, you get the distinct impression they feel bored and exasperated by having to tolerate such inane questions from such a mediocre panel.
Hayward, I suspect largely because of his insouciance, is relieved of control and sent back to England to join his mates at his yacht club and sailing regatta.
In steps the tall blond American, who once ran AMOCO, Robert Dudley. He assumes a low profile until the well is capped. Then, surprisingly, he starts making like this is not all BP’s fault, adding self-indulgence to the BP executive profile.
* * *
As these men paraded across the television screen, I thought of Nietzsche’s “all too human,” men charged with major responsibilities unable to escape their collective pettiness, failing not only to act as managers but even less as leaders. They pranced, prowled, postured and pouted, as I would imagine Nero and Napoleon once did. They are the prototype of what constitutes leadership today. And they are legion in every aspect of American society. They are also the one percent earning up to fifty percent of our collective wealth. We wonder why we are having problems.
* * *
WHEN A WHISPER BECOMES A SHOUT
Such men as Brown, Haywood and Dudley can be imagined sitting together with their minions coming up with the strategy, “We have to cut costs by twenty-five percent across the board.”
This is whispered in conference but shouted into the heavens at operational levels across the globe.
Top management whispers its short-range thinking and the die is cast across the corporate world to its remotest parts. No one thinks of unintended consequences. Expediency rules. That means what is most career enhancing and will cause the least fuss is followed. Union workers won’t be touched but vulnerable professionals without clout will be dispatched.
The greatest savings, however, will be found in operations by cutting back on maintenance, engineering, research, training and development, safety and security. BP has been doing precisely this for years.
(1) At Prudhoe Bay, they cut back on running a pig through the pipelines to remove corrosion and interference, and in some cases quit the process altogether. In addition, they quit hiring highly qualified inspectors in the field and put unqualified people into the jobs to show they had an inspection corps. Moreover, repairs and maintenance were cut back.
(2) The Texas City Oil Refinery was in start-up mode and its isomerization unit malfunctioned. A tower began to fill with gasoline, overflowed, and the excess gasoline flowed into a back up unit, which overflowed sending a geyser of gasoline into the air with a tremendous explosion. Operations were in risk denial with risk blinders on, as the instrumentation meant to monitor and prevent this from happening had not been repaired.
(3) A hurricane hit an oilrig but did not cause damage to this forty-story tower. The collapse of two stanchions was due to a valve meant to discharge water in such an emergency. It had been installed backwards taking on water instead leading to the collapse.
(4) The oilrig in the Gulf of Mexico failed to use the proper mud and cylinder protection for the well. Maintenance procedures had been cut back or abandoned as part of the twenty-five percent cost reduction program. When Tony Hayward was asked about mud and cylinder protection, he claimed total ignorance as if that was not part of his job. “That’s operations.”
* * *
It is easy to point fingers at BP executives as if this cost cutting business was an isolated case, which it isn’t. The pressure to be profitable results too often in putting profits before people, and shareholders before good sense.
(1) The Prudhoe Bay disaster could have been avoided with a $100,000 investment, instead it cost millions;
(2) The Texas City Oil Refinery disaster could have been avoided with an investment of $1 million, instead it cost tens of millions;
(3) The faulty installation of the discharge valve for the oilrig in the hurricane could have been nothing; instead it cost millions to get the rig operating again;
(4) The oilrig disaster in the Gulf could have been avoided by following maintenance procedures for about $1 million; instead it is costing tens of billions of dollars and irrevocable damage to the ecosystem and the economic stability of the region.
* * *
LIVINGSTON HAS IT RIGHT
William L. Livingston IV, author of DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010), addresses the problems of organizational bondage with insight, penetrating logic, and courageous indifference to sacred cows.
He recognizes the flaws of institutional society, its infallibility and inability to learn from its mistakes much less its excesses. He sees management in its present iteration as an obstacle to progress. And he sees education from our most esteemed institutions to the common denominator of primary and secondary education in rigid conformity to hindsight thinking.
Livingston is an engineer, and the society that we all enjoy is the product of engineering. It has taken the science of research and developed that science into products and services that have created modernity.
One wonders if his book might find a different audience than the one he seeks. That was true of Jonathan Swift and his “Gulliver Travels” (1726). It was meant as a political satire aimed at the English people, and became a children’s classic. I sense that Livingston’s work meant for engineers surviving in a litigious climate might become a social commentary of our times.
* * *
THE WORLD IS LEAVING THE UNITED STATES BEHIND
From 1950 to 1980, it was said, as the United States goes, so goes the world. That was my era. It was also the time when a world decimated by World War Two in which tens of millions lost their lives. It was a world hungry for American products and services.
It was easy for a poor boy to get an education, to rise in the corporation, and to experience a privileged existence that was new in his family’s history. Detroit ruled and the big three automakers created the working middleclass by generous pay and benefits. Companies across the nation emulated Detroit.
Organizations grew fat and lazy with as many as twelve levels of management when there had only been three during the war. Public schools, public transportation, public parks and libraries, public recreation centers, public highways, bridges, dams and millions of miles of railroad tracks made mobility a common experience.
Working class philosopher Eric Hoffer once said, “The difference between the United States and the rest of the world is maintenance.” He was referring to how well kept our infrastructure, and how dedicated we were to excellence.
* * *
The last thirty years, 1980 to 2010, have seen much of the American dream, upward mobility, and being better off then our parents fade. Stability has given way to flux, confidence to fear, moderation to greed. Manners have given way to vulgarity, trust to deception, ambition to short cuts, and education from enlightenment to job training.
* * *
Alas, President Barak Obama has had the misfortune to come into office when the United States economy is shrinking for the first time in sixty years. Globalization and the technological revolution are the culprits in this tectonic shift, but many prefer to focus on Obama’s place of birth, religion and loyalty rather than the reality that drives our times.
We like to think of the United States as the lone Super Power, as No. 1, challenging anyone who would suggest otherwise. Rome was once in our shoes, so was Great Britain, and now it appears to be our turn to decline.
* * *
Thomas Friedman discusses in his column today (October 28, 2010) a report headed by Charles M. Vest, formerly MIT president, titled “Gathering Storm.” The report concludes, “In spite of the efforts of both those in government and the private sector, the outlook for America to compete for quality jobs has further deteriorated in the past five years.” Here are some US rankings:
(1) Sixth in global innovation-based competitiveness;
(2) Fortieth in rate of change over the last decade;
(3) Eleventh among industrialized nations in the fraction of 25-to-34-year-olds who have graduated from high school;
(4) Sixteenth in college completion rate;
(5) Twenty-second in broadband Internet access;
(6) Twenty-fourth in life expectancy at birth;
(7) Twenty-seventh among developed nations in proportion of college students receiving degrees in science and engineering;
(8) Forty-eighth in quality K-12 math and science education;
Friedman writes:
“A dysfunctional political system is one that knows the right answers but can’t even discuss them rationally, let alone act on them, and one that devotes vastly more attention to cable TV preachers than to recommendations by the best scientists and engineers.”
* * *
We like comfort food, comfort lifestyles, comfort information, and comfortable demands placed on us. Comfort was an unknown luxury to anyone born in the 1930s of modest circumstance.
My generation when young could look back and remember bread and unemployment lines. We accepted the fact that we had no safety net; nobody to bail us out if we got into trouble because nobody we knew had any money or influence. We gutted it out. Some of us got lucky, and got an education and rode the 1950s to the 1980s with relative ease.
Looking back, we now feel blessed. There is a strange sense of freedom when you know it is all up to you. There were, of course, distractions but nothing compared to what there are now. There were temptations, again, but nothing compared to today. It is perhaps impossible for young people to understand how puritanical were social constraints.
The main difference was the world was thought to be America’s oyster and we behaved according to that inflated confidence. The last thirty years (1980 to 2010) have given Americans the feeling that the world is running on another track.
Double-digit unemployment (9.6 unemployment is a myth) could be with us for another generation or more. We still glory in our press clippings, in our celebrity while our healthcare costs are more than most other advanced societies but inferior in delivery. Our education is more expensive than other advanced societies and as “Gathering Storm” shows leaving something to be desired.
The irony is that other Third World countries such as China and India are now competing with us not only economically but also in terms of obesity and associated diseases with obesity. We have exported our appetites but not our modesty and discipline. So, I think Friedman is wrong to blame government alone. This is much bigger than government. It is the idea that once was America.
* * *
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
FIRE IN THE MIND: NEUROSCIENCE AND THE FISHER PARADIGM©™®
FIRE IN THE MIND: NEUROSCIENCE AND THE FISHER PARADIGM©™®
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 26, 2010
* * *
“There never has been any doubt that, under certain circumstances, emotions disrupt reasoning. (On the other hand) reduction in emotion may constitute an equally important source of irrational behavior. The counterintuitive connection between absent emotion and warped behavior may tell us something about the biological machinery of reason.”
Antonio Damasio’s “Descartes’ Error” (2006)
* * *
Reference:
It has been a lifelong fascination of mine to understand why I have been successful given my contrary disposition. Trained in science I gravitated to technical sales without any training, but experienced alarming success. Then I was promoted into corporate management, again without any training, and managed further success, but experienced disenchantment with corpocracy. High strung, bookish, a loner, and narcissistic, I retired in my thirties, went back to graduate school to find answers acquiring a terminal degree in industrial and organization psychology. Consulting in organizational development (OD) followed. At every turn, I was reprogrammed in cognitive rational vertical, and critical thinking, but experienced success despite rather than because of this programming due to counterintuitive lateral and creative thinking, all of which I picked up as my life unfolded. My passion over the past forty years has been an attempt to communicate this in such a way that others would find it useful to them. Alas, I must admit in this attempt I have not been successful. Perhaps Antonio Damasio, a pure scientist, may have the answer.
* * *
Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist. He spent twenty-nine years (1976 – 2005) at the University of Iowa where he was M. W. Van Allen Professor and Head of the Department of Neurology in the Medical School. He is now at the University of Southern California where he directs the new Brain and Creativity Institute.
Feelings I believe have been the key to my success, and Dr. Damasio has researched and written two powerful books on the subject: Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (2006) and The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in Making of Consciousness (1999). He has come to believe we think with our whole bodies. I have no doubt.
These books hold special interest to me as he charts the power of feelings and mind in decision-making with an interesting set of hypotheses. He sees the brain-body-mind as a single entity. His prose is straightforward although he does go into neural anatomy, neurophysiology, neuropsychology, and brain chemistry in support of his theses. The discussion here is germane to neuroscience as it relates to consciousness and decision-making. .
* * *
He looks at feelings, culture, experience and mind in holistic terms, which is a departure from conventional neurology and traditional medicine. I am not a neuroscientist or a medical doctor, but have found evidence in his hypotheses supportive of my work in OD. In fact, my career has benefited from taking feelings seriously, listening to their messages that have bombarded my senses.
Feelings have no language but can read an individual or a situation more accurately than the mind can alone. It was the basis of the “Fisher Conflict Model of Conflict Resolution” (see Confident Selling for the 90s, 1992), and subsequently led to the creation of THE FISHER PARADIGM©™® (see www.fisherofideas.com, blog entry January 10, 2010).
The motivation to create this paradigm was to demonstrate the limits of cognitive thinking is in the decision-making process, and to show how consciousness involves the whole person and not simply the brain for wont of a better way of putting it.
Success in OD has come as a result of sensitivity to the conflicting stimuli encountered in interventions, and then letting that data percolate through the senses often translated into counterintuitive proposals for action. Feelings are like a FIRE IN THE MIND that ignites the situation with meaning beyond words and what is expected.
That said it is difficult to penetrate cultural programming and see and feel the situation with fresh senses. It demands thinking without thinking, that is, allowing your whole person to speak to you.
Damasio sees a convergent of BODY-MINDED BRAIN as the factor that leads to this increased consciousness in the decision-making.
It is a triangular typology as is THE FISHER PARADIGM
(1) Personality Profile (person),
(2) Geographic Profile (place) and
(3) Demographic Profile (thing).
The convergence of these entities generates intuition, something outside the norm.
Damasio’s triangular typology might be expressed as:
(1) The mind (self);
(2) The topographical (body), and
(3) Consciousness (brain).
The convergence of these entities generates decision-making action. What follows are liberal quotations excised from Damasio’s work with occasional comments or references to THE FISHER PARADIGM.
* * *
INSTITUTIONAL MEDICINE IS NOT HOLISTIC
The mind has been of little concern to mainstream medicine; in fact, the chief focus of the medical specialties to the present time is on the study of the brain, brain diseases, and neurology.
(Comment: Charlie Rose on PBS has had a twelve part series of the top scientists in neurology and brain medicine and not one word was devoted to mind.).
The net result of this has been a remarkable neglect of the mind as a function of the body.
The mind has been left as a major concern of religion and philosophy.
The body has been cut off from the mind. Psychosomatic illnesses have been considered just that, in the patient’s head.
Discounted is the placebo effect, that is, when a patient is not given a medicine but a placebo, yet registers similar or more positive results.
The fact that psychological disturbances can cause diseases of the body is just being taken seriously. Psychopathology can be increased when the human heart is in conflict with itself.
The rift with Western medicine between body and mind has seen a substantial increase in an alternative focus of medicine including acupuncture and herbal medicine.
Modern medicine has “cured” a number of dreaded diseases such as small pox, diphtheria, polio, and controlled a number of others.
Current success of alternative medicine is a symptom of public dissatisfaction with traditional medicine, especially those rooted in non-Western traditions of medicine, and a compensatory response to the problem.
Bruised feelings, desperate pleas for help from pain and suffering, the loss of a sense of inner balance, the desperate cry for happiness, to which most humans aspire, is not likely to diminish soon.
With all the genome research, with all the identity of certain diseases or conditions with genes, much of each brain circuitry at any moment of adult life is individual and unique, truly a reflection of the individual’s history and circumstances.
To understand in a satisfactory manner the brain that fabricates human mind and human behavior, it is necessary to take into account its social and cultural context. And that makes the endeavor truly daunting.
Complicating this further individuals operate in collectives of like thinking and believing humans.
The most elaborate social conventions and ethical structures by which we live, however, must have arisen culturally and been transmitted likewise. The mind and behavior of such individuals operate in a specific cultural and physical environment.
Said another way, individuals are not shaped merely by activity-driven circuitries and even less do genes alone shape them.
Life is about choices. Pain and pleasure are the levers required for instinctual and acquired strategies to operate efficiently. These levers control the development of social decision-making strategies.
The brain plots the pain-pleasure representation of a local body state change. This is a somatosensory (body feeling) perception derived from the skin. The second results from a more general change in body state are an emotion. The perception in that landscape is modulated further in the brain by neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, for example, endorphins (the body’s own morphine), which are important in the perception of a “pleasure landscape.” This can cancel or reduce the perception of a “pain landscape”
(Comment: in other words, feelings can give a clue to the state of the landscape if alert to them).
Suffering puts us on notice. Suffering offers the best protection for survival.
(Comment: When you experience unease, stimuli is bombarding your consciousness telling you what is about. It is an alarm, a signal to direct your attention to envelop the landscape not bothering at the moment to process the information but only to collect it. Patience allows the information to seep into your consciousness unravel itself of its complexities into constructs that eventually provide relevance and meaning.).
* * *
THE BODY-MINDED BRAIN OR THINKING WITH YOUR WHOLE PERSON
The body provides a ground reference for the mind.
When a memory of the seen landscape is formed, that memory will be a neural record of many of the organismic changes just described, some of which happen in the brain itself and some of which happen in the body proper.
This is the landscape of homeostasis and a state of functional balance. The body proper is not passive. The body acts continuously on the environment (actions and explorations did not come first) and the environment acts continuously on the body. This interaction is necessary for survival and to avoid danger. Perceiving (danger) is as much about acting on the environment as it is as it is about receiving signals from it.
The idea that mind derives from the entire body as an ensemble may sound counterintuitive at first. The body contributes more than life support and modulatory effects to the brain. It contributes a content that is part and parcel of the workings of the normal mind.
* * *
[Comment: This is taken from THE FISHER PARADIGM.
In the 1970s I was a contract consultant to the Fairfax County Police Department. In the process of interviewing scores of detectives, when I brought up a sensitive issue, they would adjust their shoulder holsters.
Fast forward to Washington, D.C., after going to a play, and having dinner with the Secretary of State of Iowa, I called FCPD for a ride back to my hotel in Fairfax City, some twelve miles away. The officer couldn’t pick me up for an hour so I went walking down Pennsylvania Avenue. It was 2 a.m. I suddenly noticed three black youths walking parallel to me across the street. They ran across the street about 10 yards from me on my side of the street, jiving as I approached. I sensed danger but didn’t break my stride.
Two things passed through my mind. I remembered that a US Senator had been accosted and nearly killed recently in this manner, and then I remembered how detectives adjusted their shoulder holsters. I was aware of my stature, six-four, two twenty, in a three piece suit and topcoat, ramrod straight posture, quickly imitating a police officer, having spent some nine months with them, adjusting my phantom holster, and saying, “A little past your curfew, isn’t it boys?”
They first looked at me stunned, and then quickly recovered moving aside for me to pass, saying as I did so, “There goes the fuzz.”
When I shared this with the police officer who picked me up at 3 a.m., he said, “You probably saved your life.”
Lessons learned:
(1) Think with your whole body, mind, and brain;
(2) Remember we are all animals with an instinct for survival;
(3) Self-preservation is the animal’s code;
(4) We have the same alarm system as other animals;
(5) Don’t discount intuition;
(6) Be alert to what instinct is bombarding your brain to tell you;
(7) OD educates you to think with your whole person and to use all your senses.
We think and feel with our mind that is in our whole body and not simply isolated in our brain.]
* * *
Damasio continues:
Let us return to the example of your midnight walk home (comment: Damasio’s example dovetailed with the one above). Your brain has detected a threat, namely the person following you, and initiates several complicated chains of biochemical and neural reactions. You will be aware3 that you are in danger that you are now quite alarmed and perhaps should walk faster. The “you” I will call “self” is based on activities throughout your entire body, that is, the body proper and in the brain.
What the brain constructs to describe the situation, and the movements formulated as a response to the situation, depend on mutual brain-body interactive chemistry.
Making mind arise out of the whole body rather than out of a disembodied brain is compatible with a number of assumptions:
(1) The brain generates not only motor responses (actions), but also mental responses (images in the mind). Those images enhance survival by a greater appreciation of external circumstances, perceiving more details about an object, locating it more accurately in space, refining motor responses, predicting consequences by way of imagining the scenario and planning actions conducive to achieving the best imagined scenario (Comment: adjusting the phantom shoulder holster imagining myself as if a plainclothes police officer).
(2) Since minded survival was aimed at the survival of the whole person, the primordial representation of the minding brain had to concern the body proper in terms of the structure and functional state, including the external and internal actions with which the person responded to the environment (Comment: I did not break my stride imagining myself in mind as well as in body deportment a police officer).
We are actually far more aware of the overall state of the body than we usually admit, but it is apparent that as vision, hearing, and touch evolved, that attention usually allocated to their component of overall perception increased accordingly. Thus the perception of the body proper more often than not was left precisely where it did, and does the best job: “in the background.”
I am not suggesting that body representations dominate the landscape of our mind (moments of emotional upheaval excepted), but the images of body state are in the background and ready to spring forward. I prefer to think that the body remains “in the loop” for reasoned outlined.
I am immensely interested in the subject or consciousness and am convinced that neurobiology can begin to approach the subject, confining my comments to one aspect that is pertinent to the discussion on images, feelings, and somatic (body) markers. It concerns the neural basis of the self, the understanding of which might shed some light on the process of subjectivity, a key feature of consciousness.
The self recognizes and understands the situation. The self locates the problem from the vantage point of selfhood. The frame of reference is not different from the one they would use were they referring to a problem with their knees or elbows.
You cannot have a self without wakefulness, arousal, and the formation of images, but technically you can be awake and aroused and have images formed in sectors of your brain and mind, while having a compromised self.
(Comment: Damasio then goes into pathological alterations of wakefulness and arousal that cause stupor, vegetative state, and coma, conditions in which the self vanishes entirely. Our interests here is in the healthy engaged self.).
In using the notion of self, I am in no way suggesting that all the contents of our minds are inspected by a single central knower and owner, and even less that such an entity would reside in a single brain place. I am saying, though, that our experiences tend to have a consistent perspective.
(Comment: This is important in the scheme of OD work.).
I imagined this perspective to be rooted in a relatively stable, endlessly repeated biological state. The source of the stability is the predominantly invariant structure and operation of the person, and the slowly evolving elements of his autobiography
(Comment: Damasio emphasizes autobiography. Somehow I realized the importance of this long ago, and have used it as a source to my OD work. Readers have commented on this, wondering if I am self-conscious about this. The answer is “no.” OD work has no depth without its biographical nature and narrative.).
You might imagine this biographical narrative as a representative picture (a sort of file) that is held in the association cortices of many brain sites rather than as a filing cabinet. This defines our person. Over and above such categorization, there are unique facts from our past that are constantly activated as mapped representations: where we live and work, what our jobs is precisely, our own name and the names of close kin and friends, of city and country.
We have a dispositional memory, a collection of recent events, along with their approximate temporal continuity, and we also have a collection of plans, a number of imaginary events we intend to make happen or expect to happen. This is memory of the possible future.
This endless reactivation of updated images about our identity constitutes a sizable part of the state of self.
What is happening to us now is, in fact, happening to a concept of self-based on the past, including the past that was current only a moment ago. At each moment of the state of self is constructed from the ground up. It is an evanescent reference state, so continuously and consistently reconstructed that the owner never knows it is being remade.
The concept of self is a coordinated activity of multiple brain regions, but our self, or even better our metaself, only “learns” about that “now” an instant later. We are hopelessly late for consciousness.
DAMSAIO’S TRIANGULAR TYPOLOGY
When the brain generates a set of responses to an entity, the existence of a representation of self does not make that self know that its corresponding subject is responding. The self cannot know. However, the “metaself” might know, provided:
(1) The brain would create some description of the perturbation;
(2) The description generated an image of the process;
(3) The image of the self-perturbed would then be displayed in a rapid interpolation of the image that triggered the perturbation.
The description does not use language although it can be translated into language
(Comment: This is similar to the epiphany process toward intuition as described by THE FISHER PARADIGM. Insight registers as a feeling without language in a subjective characterization.).
Having an image alone is not enough, even if we invoke attention and awareness, as they are properties of a self as it experiences images. Having both images and self is not sufficient either. One would not understand what the references consist of, or what they achieve. How subjectivity would emerge from such a process would be entirely mysterious.
[Comment: Damasio suggests a third-party neuron ensemble in a “convergence zone” that supports the images of the object and the images of the self in a reciprocal interconnection that subjectively brings the fontal brain (thinking) and the limbic system (feeling) into play.]
An object that is being represented, a person responding to the object, and a state of the self in the process of changing because of the person’s response to the object – are held simultaneously in working memory and attended, side-by-side in early sensory cortices.
(Comment: Feelings become facts on a subjective basis and are treated as such.).
Subjectivity emerges during the latter step when the brain is producing not just images of an object, not just imagines of the person’s responses to the object, but a third kind of image, that of a person in the act of perceiving and responding to an object.
(Comment: This describes my reaction and behavior with the three boys mentioned earlier.)
Language may not be the source of the self, but it certainly is the source of the “I.” Francis Crick’s hypothesis on consciousness is focused on the problem of image making and leaves out subjectivity altogether.
(Comment: This is not surprising as scientists are committed to objectivity often at the expense of their subjective nature. In OD work, subjectivity is crucial to success as we see, feel and think regardless of the stimuli with our whole person.)
* * *
MY FINAL WORD
At the core of human consciousness is the consciousness of feeling, experiencing self, the very thought of oneself connected to yet separated from significant others. With the OD practitioner, this is the primary tool in his toolkit. This is a modest attempt to make this apparent.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 26, 2010
* * *
“There never has been any doubt that, under certain circumstances, emotions disrupt reasoning. (On the other hand) reduction in emotion may constitute an equally important source of irrational behavior. The counterintuitive connection between absent emotion and warped behavior may tell us something about the biological machinery of reason.”
Antonio Damasio’s “Descartes’ Error” (2006)
* * *
Reference:
It has been a lifelong fascination of mine to understand why I have been successful given my contrary disposition. Trained in science I gravitated to technical sales without any training, but experienced alarming success. Then I was promoted into corporate management, again without any training, and managed further success, but experienced disenchantment with corpocracy. High strung, bookish, a loner, and narcissistic, I retired in my thirties, went back to graduate school to find answers acquiring a terminal degree in industrial and organization psychology. Consulting in organizational development (OD) followed. At every turn, I was reprogrammed in cognitive rational vertical, and critical thinking, but experienced success despite rather than because of this programming due to counterintuitive lateral and creative thinking, all of which I picked up as my life unfolded. My passion over the past forty years has been an attempt to communicate this in such a way that others would find it useful to them. Alas, I must admit in this attempt I have not been successful. Perhaps Antonio Damasio, a pure scientist, may have the answer.
* * *
Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist. He spent twenty-nine years (1976 – 2005) at the University of Iowa where he was M. W. Van Allen Professor and Head of the Department of Neurology in the Medical School. He is now at the University of Southern California where he directs the new Brain and Creativity Institute.
Feelings I believe have been the key to my success, and Dr. Damasio has researched and written two powerful books on the subject: Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (2006) and The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in Making of Consciousness (1999). He has come to believe we think with our whole bodies. I have no doubt.
These books hold special interest to me as he charts the power of feelings and mind in decision-making with an interesting set of hypotheses. He sees the brain-body-mind as a single entity. His prose is straightforward although he does go into neural anatomy, neurophysiology, neuropsychology, and brain chemistry in support of his theses. The discussion here is germane to neuroscience as it relates to consciousness and decision-making. .
* * *
He looks at feelings, culture, experience and mind in holistic terms, which is a departure from conventional neurology and traditional medicine. I am not a neuroscientist or a medical doctor, but have found evidence in his hypotheses supportive of my work in OD. In fact, my career has benefited from taking feelings seriously, listening to their messages that have bombarded my senses.
Feelings have no language but can read an individual or a situation more accurately than the mind can alone. It was the basis of the “Fisher Conflict Model of Conflict Resolution” (see Confident Selling for the 90s, 1992), and subsequently led to the creation of THE FISHER PARADIGM©™® (see www.fisherofideas.com, blog entry January 10, 2010).
The motivation to create this paradigm was to demonstrate the limits of cognitive thinking is in the decision-making process, and to show how consciousness involves the whole person and not simply the brain for wont of a better way of putting it.
Success in OD has come as a result of sensitivity to the conflicting stimuli encountered in interventions, and then letting that data percolate through the senses often translated into counterintuitive proposals for action. Feelings are like a FIRE IN THE MIND that ignites the situation with meaning beyond words and what is expected.
That said it is difficult to penetrate cultural programming and see and feel the situation with fresh senses. It demands thinking without thinking, that is, allowing your whole person to speak to you.
Damasio sees a convergent of BODY-MINDED BRAIN as the factor that leads to this increased consciousness in the decision-making.
It is a triangular typology as is THE FISHER PARADIGM
(1) Personality Profile (person),
(2) Geographic Profile (place) and
(3) Demographic Profile (thing).
The convergence of these entities generates intuition, something outside the norm.
Damasio’s triangular typology might be expressed as:
(1) The mind (self);
(2) The topographical (body), and
(3) Consciousness (brain).
The convergence of these entities generates decision-making action. What follows are liberal quotations excised from Damasio’s work with occasional comments or references to THE FISHER PARADIGM.
* * *
INSTITUTIONAL MEDICINE IS NOT HOLISTIC
The mind has been of little concern to mainstream medicine; in fact, the chief focus of the medical specialties to the present time is on the study of the brain, brain diseases, and neurology.
(Comment: Charlie Rose on PBS has had a twelve part series of the top scientists in neurology and brain medicine and not one word was devoted to mind.).
The net result of this has been a remarkable neglect of the mind as a function of the body.
The mind has been left as a major concern of religion and philosophy.
The body has been cut off from the mind. Psychosomatic illnesses have been considered just that, in the patient’s head.
Discounted is the placebo effect, that is, when a patient is not given a medicine but a placebo, yet registers similar or more positive results.
The fact that psychological disturbances can cause diseases of the body is just being taken seriously. Psychopathology can be increased when the human heart is in conflict with itself.
The rift with Western medicine between body and mind has seen a substantial increase in an alternative focus of medicine including acupuncture and herbal medicine.
Modern medicine has “cured” a number of dreaded diseases such as small pox, diphtheria, polio, and controlled a number of others.
Current success of alternative medicine is a symptom of public dissatisfaction with traditional medicine, especially those rooted in non-Western traditions of medicine, and a compensatory response to the problem.
Bruised feelings, desperate pleas for help from pain and suffering, the loss of a sense of inner balance, the desperate cry for happiness, to which most humans aspire, is not likely to diminish soon.
With all the genome research, with all the identity of certain diseases or conditions with genes, much of each brain circuitry at any moment of adult life is individual and unique, truly a reflection of the individual’s history and circumstances.
To understand in a satisfactory manner the brain that fabricates human mind and human behavior, it is necessary to take into account its social and cultural context. And that makes the endeavor truly daunting.
Complicating this further individuals operate in collectives of like thinking and believing humans.
The most elaborate social conventions and ethical structures by which we live, however, must have arisen culturally and been transmitted likewise. The mind and behavior of such individuals operate in a specific cultural and physical environment.
Said another way, individuals are not shaped merely by activity-driven circuitries and even less do genes alone shape them.
Life is about choices. Pain and pleasure are the levers required for instinctual and acquired strategies to operate efficiently. These levers control the development of social decision-making strategies.
The brain plots the pain-pleasure representation of a local body state change. This is a somatosensory (body feeling) perception derived from the skin. The second results from a more general change in body state are an emotion. The perception in that landscape is modulated further in the brain by neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, for example, endorphins (the body’s own morphine), which are important in the perception of a “pleasure landscape.” This can cancel or reduce the perception of a “pain landscape”
(Comment: in other words, feelings can give a clue to the state of the landscape if alert to them).
Suffering puts us on notice. Suffering offers the best protection for survival.
(Comment: When you experience unease, stimuli is bombarding your consciousness telling you what is about. It is an alarm, a signal to direct your attention to envelop the landscape not bothering at the moment to process the information but only to collect it. Patience allows the information to seep into your consciousness unravel itself of its complexities into constructs that eventually provide relevance and meaning.).
* * *
THE BODY-MINDED BRAIN OR THINKING WITH YOUR WHOLE PERSON
The body provides a ground reference for the mind.
When a memory of the seen landscape is formed, that memory will be a neural record of many of the organismic changes just described, some of which happen in the brain itself and some of which happen in the body proper.
This is the landscape of homeostasis and a state of functional balance. The body proper is not passive. The body acts continuously on the environment (actions and explorations did not come first) and the environment acts continuously on the body. This interaction is necessary for survival and to avoid danger. Perceiving (danger) is as much about acting on the environment as it is as it is about receiving signals from it.
The idea that mind derives from the entire body as an ensemble may sound counterintuitive at first. The body contributes more than life support and modulatory effects to the brain. It contributes a content that is part and parcel of the workings of the normal mind.
* * *
[Comment: This is taken from THE FISHER PARADIGM.
In the 1970s I was a contract consultant to the Fairfax County Police Department. In the process of interviewing scores of detectives, when I brought up a sensitive issue, they would adjust their shoulder holsters.
Fast forward to Washington, D.C., after going to a play, and having dinner with the Secretary of State of Iowa, I called FCPD for a ride back to my hotel in Fairfax City, some twelve miles away. The officer couldn’t pick me up for an hour so I went walking down Pennsylvania Avenue. It was 2 a.m. I suddenly noticed three black youths walking parallel to me across the street. They ran across the street about 10 yards from me on my side of the street, jiving as I approached. I sensed danger but didn’t break my stride.
Two things passed through my mind. I remembered that a US Senator had been accosted and nearly killed recently in this manner, and then I remembered how detectives adjusted their shoulder holsters. I was aware of my stature, six-four, two twenty, in a three piece suit and topcoat, ramrod straight posture, quickly imitating a police officer, having spent some nine months with them, adjusting my phantom holster, and saying, “A little past your curfew, isn’t it boys?”
They first looked at me stunned, and then quickly recovered moving aside for me to pass, saying as I did so, “There goes the fuzz.”
When I shared this with the police officer who picked me up at 3 a.m., he said, “You probably saved your life.”
Lessons learned:
(1) Think with your whole body, mind, and brain;
(2) Remember we are all animals with an instinct for survival;
(3) Self-preservation is the animal’s code;
(4) We have the same alarm system as other animals;
(5) Don’t discount intuition;
(6) Be alert to what instinct is bombarding your brain to tell you;
(7) OD educates you to think with your whole person and to use all your senses.
We think and feel with our mind that is in our whole body and not simply isolated in our brain.]
* * *
Damasio continues:
Let us return to the example of your midnight walk home (comment: Damasio’s example dovetailed with the one above). Your brain has detected a threat, namely the person following you, and initiates several complicated chains of biochemical and neural reactions. You will be aware3 that you are in danger that you are now quite alarmed and perhaps should walk faster. The “you” I will call “self” is based on activities throughout your entire body, that is, the body proper and in the brain.
What the brain constructs to describe the situation, and the movements formulated as a response to the situation, depend on mutual brain-body interactive chemistry.
Making mind arise out of the whole body rather than out of a disembodied brain is compatible with a number of assumptions:
(1) The brain generates not only motor responses (actions), but also mental responses (images in the mind). Those images enhance survival by a greater appreciation of external circumstances, perceiving more details about an object, locating it more accurately in space, refining motor responses, predicting consequences by way of imagining the scenario and planning actions conducive to achieving the best imagined scenario (Comment: adjusting the phantom shoulder holster imagining myself as if a plainclothes police officer).
(2) Since minded survival was aimed at the survival of the whole person, the primordial representation of the minding brain had to concern the body proper in terms of the structure and functional state, including the external and internal actions with which the person responded to the environment (Comment: I did not break my stride imagining myself in mind as well as in body deportment a police officer).
We are actually far more aware of the overall state of the body than we usually admit, but it is apparent that as vision, hearing, and touch evolved, that attention usually allocated to their component of overall perception increased accordingly. Thus the perception of the body proper more often than not was left precisely where it did, and does the best job: “in the background.”
I am not suggesting that body representations dominate the landscape of our mind (moments of emotional upheaval excepted), but the images of body state are in the background and ready to spring forward. I prefer to think that the body remains “in the loop” for reasoned outlined.
I am immensely interested in the subject or consciousness and am convinced that neurobiology can begin to approach the subject, confining my comments to one aspect that is pertinent to the discussion on images, feelings, and somatic (body) markers. It concerns the neural basis of the self, the understanding of which might shed some light on the process of subjectivity, a key feature of consciousness.
The self recognizes and understands the situation. The self locates the problem from the vantage point of selfhood. The frame of reference is not different from the one they would use were they referring to a problem with their knees or elbows.
You cannot have a self without wakefulness, arousal, and the formation of images, but technically you can be awake and aroused and have images formed in sectors of your brain and mind, while having a compromised self.
(Comment: Damasio then goes into pathological alterations of wakefulness and arousal that cause stupor, vegetative state, and coma, conditions in which the self vanishes entirely. Our interests here is in the healthy engaged self.).
In using the notion of self, I am in no way suggesting that all the contents of our minds are inspected by a single central knower and owner, and even less that such an entity would reside in a single brain place. I am saying, though, that our experiences tend to have a consistent perspective.
(Comment: This is important in the scheme of OD work.).
I imagined this perspective to be rooted in a relatively stable, endlessly repeated biological state. The source of the stability is the predominantly invariant structure and operation of the person, and the slowly evolving elements of his autobiography
(Comment: Damasio emphasizes autobiography. Somehow I realized the importance of this long ago, and have used it as a source to my OD work. Readers have commented on this, wondering if I am self-conscious about this. The answer is “no.” OD work has no depth without its biographical nature and narrative.).
You might imagine this biographical narrative as a representative picture (a sort of file) that is held in the association cortices of many brain sites rather than as a filing cabinet. This defines our person. Over and above such categorization, there are unique facts from our past that are constantly activated as mapped representations: where we live and work, what our jobs is precisely, our own name and the names of close kin and friends, of city and country.
We have a dispositional memory, a collection of recent events, along with their approximate temporal continuity, and we also have a collection of plans, a number of imaginary events we intend to make happen or expect to happen. This is memory of the possible future.
This endless reactivation of updated images about our identity constitutes a sizable part of the state of self.
What is happening to us now is, in fact, happening to a concept of self-based on the past, including the past that was current only a moment ago. At each moment of the state of self is constructed from the ground up. It is an evanescent reference state, so continuously and consistently reconstructed that the owner never knows it is being remade.
The concept of self is a coordinated activity of multiple brain regions, but our self, or even better our metaself, only “learns” about that “now” an instant later. We are hopelessly late for consciousness.
DAMSAIO’S TRIANGULAR TYPOLOGY
When the brain generates a set of responses to an entity, the existence of a representation of self does not make that self know that its corresponding subject is responding. The self cannot know. However, the “metaself” might know, provided:
(1) The brain would create some description of the perturbation;
(2) The description generated an image of the process;
(3) The image of the self-perturbed would then be displayed in a rapid interpolation of the image that triggered the perturbation.
The description does not use language although it can be translated into language
(Comment: This is similar to the epiphany process toward intuition as described by THE FISHER PARADIGM. Insight registers as a feeling without language in a subjective characterization.).
Having an image alone is not enough, even if we invoke attention and awareness, as they are properties of a self as it experiences images. Having both images and self is not sufficient either. One would not understand what the references consist of, or what they achieve. How subjectivity would emerge from such a process would be entirely mysterious.
[Comment: Damasio suggests a third-party neuron ensemble in a “convergence zone” that supports the images of the object and the images of the self in a reciprocal interconnection that subjectively brings the fontal brain (thinking) and the limbic system (feeling) into play.]
An object that is being represented, a person responding to the object, and a state of the self in the process of changing because of the person’s response to the object – are held simultaneously in working memory and attended, side-by-side in early sensory cortices.
(Comment: Feelings become facts on a subjective basis and are treated as such.).
Subjectivity emerges during the latter step when the brain is producing not just images of an object, not just imagines of the person’s responses to the object, but a third kind of image, that of a person in the act of perceiving and responding to an object.
(Comment: This describes my reaction and behavior with the three boys mentioned earlier.)
Language may not be the source of the self, but it certainly is the source of the “I.” Francis Crick’s hypothesis on consciousness is focused on the problem of image making and leaves out subjectivity altogether.
(Comment: This is not surprising as scientists are committed to objectivity often at the expense of their subjective nature. In OD work, subjectivity is crucial to success as we see, feel and think regardless of the stimuli with our whole person.)
* * *
MY FINAL WORD
At the core of human consciousness is the consciousness of feeling, experiencing self, the very thought of oneself connected to yet separated from significant others. With the OD practitioner, this is the primary tool in his toolkit. This is a modest attempt to make this apparent.
* * *
Thursday, October 14, 2010
WOW! REACTION TO “CLICHÉS THAT HAVE WORKED FOR ME”
WOW! REACTION TO “CLICHÉS THAT HAVE WORKED FOR ME”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 14, 2010
* * *
REFERENCE:
This has been the greatest response of the some 562 missives published on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com) to date.
There is a consistent theme to the reaction to this missive, and because of that, I’m sharing two representative comments. There was, however, reference made to the length of the missive by some suggesting it was informative but a bit too long.
I pondered this. My inclination is to read THE NEW YORK REVIEW, THE LONDON REVIEW, FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND THE SMITHSONIAN. Many essays in these publications are as long as 10,000 words. Length has never bothered me, but I have trained myself to be a fast reader. I'll have to work on this.
Another common comment is that there is an edge to my writing. I find that true of many of the writers I read.
One reader has reminded me how indebted I am to my wife, "Beautiful Betty (BB), to which I concur. He implied that she has softened me, or rounded off some of my rough edges.
Speaking to that, several years ago, during a seminar I was conducting, I admitted to this edginess. After that seminar, a lady came up and asked, “What do you read?”
“Books and periodicals,” I answered putting my stuff together to leave.
“No, that is not my question,” she smiled demurely. “What do you read? That is my question.”
I told her I read novels, biographies, histories, books on psychology, sociology, philosophy, theology, and such.”
“What kind of novels?"
"Dostoyevsky, Camus, Sartre, Joyce and writers of that ilk. Mysteries. I tend to read every novel my favorite mystery writers have written. I read some of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and …”
“I get the point. What type of biographies?”
“All kinds! Of historical personalities, philosophers, religious leaders, men of the soft and hard sciences, medicine.”
“What kind of histories?”
“Mainly American and Western Civilization, but also of Eastern religions through Western interpreters. Pardon me, but where is this going?”
“Be patient. I’m not through. What don’t you read?”
“What don’t I read? I’m not much into sci-fi, or comic novels, don’t read true crime or horror. I have read Steven King, but liked only THE STAND. I don’t read celebrity biographies or many national bestsellers. Does that help?”
“My reading differs with yours, but I sense you are a prisoner of your reading the same as I am. Think about that.” Then she left.
If she is right, and she may be, my inability to write more clearly or poignantly could boil down to what I read. Obviously, writers have influenced me. Still, it is a handicap readers in the end are the final determiners. In any case, readers of this piece have been more than generous.
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
Thank you for this piece. It is the best you have written in months, maybe even more than a year.
Always, when you write from the heart there is so much more meaning than the academic pieces. Those are very good, however, and informative and greatly appreciated.
When you write about life, there is a very different tone. You even seem to use the language differently. It is softer but still hard-edged, like a velvet gloved iron fist.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003) was somewhat like that. In this piece, you have obviously advanced your ability to tell a story with heart.
Everybody wants to be a critic, and I apologize if that’s what this sounds like. It’s difficult to explain why this resonated with me to the extent that it did.
Michael
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Michael,
Thank you for your comment. It is deeply appreciated. I write the best I can every day, and hopefully, the practice will help me deserve your comments.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Jim,
This is one of the most powerful pieces of writing I have ever read. You put in a nutshell what life is, and should be about. I thank you for this piece of prose. It has impressed and influenced me in more ways than I can express. Thank you.
Mary
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Mary,
Your comments are humbling. Thank you.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 14, 2010
* * *
REFERENCE:
This has been the greatest response of the some 562 missives published on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com) to date.
There is a consistent theme to the reaction to this missive, and because of that, I’m sharing two representative comments. There was, however, reference made to the length of the missive by some suggesting it was informative but a bit too long.
I pondered this. My inclination is to read THE NEW YORK REVIEW, THE LONDON REVIEW, FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND THE SMITHSONIAN. Many essays in these publications are as long as 10,000 words. Length has never bothered me, but I have trained myself to be a fast reader. I'll have to work on this.
Another common comment is that there is an edge to my writing. I find that true of many of the writers I read.
One reader has reminded me how indebted I am to my wife, "Beautiful Betty (BB), to which I concur. He implied that she has softened me, or rounded off some of my rough edges.
Speaking to that, several years ago, during a seminar I was conducting, I admitted to this edginess. After that seminar, a lady came up and asked, “What do you read?”
“Books and periodicals,” I answered putting my stuff together to leave.
“No, that is not my question,” she smiled demurely. “What do you read? That is my question.”
I told her I read novels, biographies, histories, books on psychology, sociology, philosophy, theology, and such.”
“What kind of novels?"
"Dostoyevsky, Camus, Sartre, Joyce and writers of that ilk. Mysteries. I tend to read every novel my favorite mystery writers have written. I read some of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and …”
“I get the point. What type of biographies?”
“All kinds! Of historical personalities, philosophers, religious leaders, men of the soft and hard sciences, medicine.”
“What kind of histories?”
“Mainly American and Western Civilization, but also of Eastern religions through Western interpreters. Pardon me, but where is this going?”
“Be patient. I’m not through. What don’t you read?”
“What don’t I read? I’m not much into sci-fi, or comic novels, don’t read true crime or horror. I have read Steven King, but liked only THE STAND. I don’t read celebrity biographies or many national bestsellers. Does that help?”
“My reading differs with yours, but I sense you are a prisoner of your reading the same as I am. Think about that.” Then she left.
If she is right, and she may be, my inability to write more clearly or poignantly could boil down to what I read. Obviously, writers have influenced me. Still, it is a handicap readers in the end are the final determiners. In any case, readers of this piece have been more than generous.
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
Thank you for this piece. It is the best you have written in months, maybe even more than a year.
Always, when you write from the heart there is so much more meaning than the academic pieces. Those are very good, however, and informative and greatly appreciated.
When you write about life, there is a very different tone. You even seem to use the language differently. It is softer but still hard-edged, like a velvet gloved iron fist.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003) was somewhat like that. In this piece, you have obviously advanced your ability to tell a story with heart.
Everybody wants to be a critic, and I apologize if that’s what this sounds like. It’s difficult to explain why this resonated with me to the extent that it did.
Michael
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Michael,
Thank you for your comment. It is deeply appreciated. I write the best I can every day, and hopefully, the practice will help me deserve your comments.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Jim,
This is one of the most powerful pieces of writing I have ever read. You put in a nutshell what life is, and should be about. I thank you for this piece of prose. It has impressed and influenced me in more ways than I can express. Thank you.
Mary
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Mary,
Your comments are humbling. Thank you.
Be always well,
Jim
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
CLICHÉS THAT HAVE WORKED FOR ME – CONVERSATION WITH MY COLLEGE BOUND GRANDSON
CLICHÉS THAT HAVE WORKED FOR ME – CONVERSATION WITH MY COLLEGE BOUND GRANDSON
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 13, 2010
* * *
When the sun is setting on a long satisfying day, it is easy to forget how it rose with worrying uncertainties. The same could be said for a life. Every life is an adventure with a story to tell.
Recently, I had a brief visit with one of my grandsons, a college bound young man I see far too little of as he lives up north. He has grown tall and straight, quiet but funny, with an engaging personality and a captivating smile.
It has not been an easy road to his eighteen years. He has seen more of life than a young person should and still remain wholesome but he has. If anyone deserves to find happiness, and to succeed in life, he does. He has paid his dues.
What is most engaging about him, he doesn’t consider his situation unique. Nor does he believe it makes him special. It doesn’t. It does imbue him, however, with maturity rare for his generation.
He has been forced by circumstances to make the most of difficult circumstances, and to take nothing or anybody much less anything for granted. He is light years ahead of most eighteen-year-olds. So, I felt somewhat taken aback when he asked me what was the key to my success.
It is easy to wax philosophical with this ambivalent word, success, and sidestep the failures and regrets that have been part of the journey.
That said it was clear he wanted something to grab hold of when only truisms came to mind. He knows little of our family history, of the mainly accidental journey through which I, and now he have sprung from our mainly Irish family tree.
I sat there wondering what to say, realizing I have enjoyed an incredibly blessed life often despite rather than because of what I am. How to share this? I told him I could only express what seemed to work for me. “That is what I want to hear, bumpa,” he said.
* * *
THE IMPORTANCE OF PASSION
The most important thing to have is passion for what you do. Passion not only energizes you but fills your body and soul with spiritual health that sustains you when the unexpected occurs, or when the inevitable disappointment throws you off stride.
Passion is not the drive to become but the satisfaction of being who you are where you are doing what you are doing.
The purpose of life at every stage is what you are doing, not what you plan to do or hope to become but what you are doing right now.
Passion fills your body and soul with joy. Consider this. You work on something with all your being. It can be a sport, a project at school or around the house, anything that drains you to the limits of your energy. How do you feel? Exhausted? Of course.
You take a shower; feeling clean inside and out, refreshed, satisfied knowing you have done your best. Something happens. You start to feel your energy returning. You see everything more clearly. You are ready to go forward, ready to accept the consequences of your investment in time, energy, and sacrifice.
There is a simple formula that describes this:
PAIN + RISK = GROWTH
From the time we are small, we like to stand against the wall and see how much we have grown since the last time we measured ourselves. Growth is important to us. It is easy for us to think of growth in terms of our physical stature. It is less easy for us to think of growth in terms of our mental, psychological, emotional and moral stature.
Early on, we have a passion for things, a passion to dress ourselves, to do what we like, yes, and to do what we are told not to do.
We see others older than we are and want to be, do, and enjoy what they are allowed to do. We want to imitate them and to derive the benefits they have amassed by simply being older. We don’t see who and what and how they are in terms of passion much less pain and risk. We see them only in terms of what they are allowed to do versus the way we are treated.
The pain of growing physically is something everyone experiences. Yet even physical growth involves risks that either enhance that growth or retard it. You are eighteen and have seen more than most teenagers have seen in terms of how taking risks that are not life enhancing can retard your physical well being, and more importantly, can damage that precious mind of yours.
A life is a terrible thing to waste, true, but even that idea is subjective. If you are following your passions, whatever they are, your life will not be wasted.
Some may say you should be this or that because otherwise “you are wasting your talent.” Implied in this is that you are wasting your life. A life that follows its passions is like a plant that seeks the nourishment of the sun, settles in nutrient soil, and an enhancing climate for growth.
The problem with this is that that sun, that soil and that climate become revealed to us, if we have the alertness to heed that revelation, which occurs in a series of tectonic shifts in our experience. It is almost like osmosis. It permeates our temperament, in most cases, with an ultimate epiphany, but it has been working to that moment from the beginning.
You tell me you have no idea what you want to be. That is all right. Listen to your gut; yes, I said your gut. It will tell you if you are on the path of your passions. That means you must pay attention to what gives you satisfaction, to what puts a sparkle in your eye, and a bounce in your step. There is no honest work that is not worthy of passion. There is no honest vocation that is not worthy of passion. There is no fulfilling relationship, despite what others may tell you is wrong for you, that is not worthy of passion.
Passion has no interest in competing and comparing. Passion has no interest in being what everyone else says is important. Passion has no interest in celebrity, in making people envious, in stimulating admiration. Passion is all about the effective utilization of your inherent ability in the service of others, which is the best way to serve yourself.
* * *
THE IMPORTANCE OF DEVELOPING A SKILL BASE
Your grandfather has had a passion for ideas and learning all his life. When he was a little boy, he was surrounded by men who never stayed in school very long, who hated school, hated formal education, thought reading books was effeminate, thought that the world was against them because of their ethnicity and religion.
They were of the opinion that the die was cast, that they were of a class and cast system with no options other than to gather around the kitchen table smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee complaining of how they were exploited at work by their bosses.
They talked in stereotypes. I didn’t know what that word meant but they repeated it enough that it stuck in my mind. “All rich people were corrupt.” "All politicians were crooks except President Roosevelt.” “All pious people were hiding something.” “People who dressed to the nines were putting on airs.” “All people with fancy homes were trying to keep up with the Joneses.”
Sitting around that kitchen table in gossipy collusion they seemed to derive pleasure from the practice. I noticed my mother, who was hard of hearing, poured coffee and cut pieces of fudge cake for them, and emptied their ashtrays but didn’t say anything. In fact, my da seemed to enjoy the company with no need to participate. I found that odd.
It was my mother who broke me out of my trance. She became my coach, counselor, mentor and friend pointing out the importance of a “skill base.” She didn’t use that expression. She talked of how I was to escape the kitchen table. My mother did not look at things in sophisticated language, but in earthy, pragmatic and perceptive ways.
It may seem cold but nonetheless true. She saw me as a commodity for sale, an amorphous bit of protoplasm with certain possibilities that would take nurturing and grooming. She started on me from the age of five when she came into my life after spending much of those earlier years in hospital.
It started with my appearance; the way I looked carried myself spoke and even walked. She said, “You are going to be tall, good looking, with a massive body that people cannot help but notice. Don’t ever forget that.” Well, of course, I did and paid for the trouble. But she was right about presence. It counts for more than it should.
My mother was a reader, a fast reader. She could read a book a day, smoking her cigarettes and drinking her coffee. Since she had poor hearing, it might have been compensation for that fact. In any case, she persuaded me that books had power and would open my mind to see itself, naked.
She told me that life was not a career, but a series of jobs. The first real job of a child, she said, was attending school. “If you don’t have a passion for school,” she said, “it is unlikely you will have much of a passion for other jobs.” She added, “Don’t blame your poor performance on your teachers. The most important teacher you will ever have is yourself. Pay attention to that teacher.”
This made little sense to me at the time. I asked her to explain. “What happens in school when you are prepared when Sister (the nun at St. Patrick's School) calls on you?”
Puzzled, I said, “I answer.”
“What is Sister’s expression?”
Still puzzled, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Does she smile? Does she compliment you?”
“She smiles.”
My mother lights a cigarette on the butt of the one in her mouth. “Progress, Jimmy, is a series of smiles and frowns in every job you will ever have. The more smiles you can produce the greater the progress you will make, and the greater the progress you make the more freedom you will enjoy.”
“Does da cause a lot of smiles?”
“Jimmy, and I don’t expect you to understand this, but your father is one of those people that has never reached the level of smiles or frowns. He is taken for granted and treated that way.”
“You are right. I don’t understand.”
“What I’m trying to say is he is not treated as a person because he could disappear tomorrow and nothing would change and nobody would miss him other than us.”
I started to cry because I had seen instances in my own presence when he was treated poorly. Anger welled up in me. I had a temper. My mother watched me through a smoker’s haze.
“You look like your father right now.” I wondered if that was good or bad. “He gets upset, which is all right if you know why you’re upset, and do something about it, but he doesn’t. Anger is not bad if you know what caused it. It is my job to help you use your anger to bring more smiles than frowns to those that have authority over you.”
* * *
Now, why am I telling you this?
It wasn’t until I came back from South Africa in 1969, half a life ago, that I realized that my drive, my passion, the multifaceted skill base that I had developed that put me in such demand was not a matter of my self-invention as I had thought. It was a result of the attention of my mother.
I, as a parent, thought my job was to create an affluent climate in which my children would find their own way, as I thought I had found mine. How arrogant.
I had forgotten those conversations with my mother, forgotten her prodding, of saying when I came home from school with three A’s and a B, that it wasn’t four A’s.
I never urged my children on as she had me. I left your mother and your uncles and aunt on their own, on what I guess could be called automatic pilot. I did them a disservice. They found their own way, but without my help. My mother installed a moral compass in me, a direction finder. Do my children have such a guidance system? I don’t think so.
My mother’s wisdom and drive contributed much to my surprisingly easy life. Some may say she lived through me, and perhaps she did The point is she understood her son’s personality was much like his father’s, and therefore knew that she had her work cut out for her to see her son got more smiles than frowns.
Discipline, direction, pain and risk, and making choices that enhanced what I had to offer came because of the compass my mother installed in me. You have had to install yours in yourself. That is admirable, and much more rare.
* * *
THE POWER OF PERSONALITY
It is a gift to be liked by most people as you are, to be able to make them laugh and feel comfortable and not threatened, to take pleasure in seeing you succeed and being happy for you.
You could have a chip on your shoulder but you don’t. In that sense, you are the superior of your grandfather. I say this to give you some sense of how I’ve handicapped myself with my personality whereas you have not. I confess that I think personality is rated much higher than it should be. I would prefer it be in balance with our essence, that is, our talent. That said we tend to surround ourselves with people like us, which exaggerates our weaknesses at the expense of our strengths.
Over the years, I have hired people and interviewed many more as part of an interviewing team. I have always rated competence higher than personality. Stated another way, being qualified for the job has been my primary interest.
My colleagues often differed with me on this seeing the most important criteria:
(1) Being comfortable with the person, and
(2) Seeing the person fitting in the organization as it is.
Once these criteria were satisfied they assured themselves that the person was also qualified or that he or she would prove to be so in time.
It should then come as little surprise that performance appraisals, promotions and raises were likewise associated with these same criteria.
I am speaking to the choir, I know, because you have already worked this out. You listen, study, observe and absorb information with a smile without saying anything, or you make a joke to relax others, and not appear threatening.
Even so, there will be some people who will be more comfortable with you than others. It is not always the people with whom we are most comfortable that are best for us.
For example, I appreciate people with ideas. I am attracted to people who question things, but they don’t always like me to question their thinking. They may withdraw, go silent, and no longer seek my input much less my questioning mind. That is all right with me. I still contact them. Why? I appreciate their minds. I’m not interested in their approval. To put it another way, I’m not looking for friends or to influence people. I’m looking to learn. Ideas turn me on.
You are a social person and like the company of friends. Choose friends, as my mother would say, wisely, that is, that enhance you as you are and as the person you want to be. Your grandfather’s friends are primarily ideas, and ideas are often in books, ideas often of people who no longer walk this earth.
It took South Africa for this to register. I love privacy and the freedom to think in the loving company of your grandmother Betty. It has nothing to do with me being a good or great thinker. It has everything to do with the person I am and choose to be. There are no absolutes in this calculus, only the flawed personification of the personal. Ultimately, life is all about choices.
* * *
THE POWER OF BEING
We have this idea that security is the end all, that we should do everything to enhance our security. We as a society have given up much of our freedom and privacy for this security. We even stay in jobs we hate because of security. We think one day we can embrace the security of retirement when we have never found time to live. .
The greatest threat to being is not security. That is like putting the cart before the horse. The greatest threat to being is fear of life.
So, many people work themselves to death; burn the candle at both ends to keep their stress levels down, and then limp into old age broken in body and spirit needing transplants or a score of prescription drugs to keep them vertical.
You are a good listener. I have not always been one. Several people along the way told me I should be doing what I’m doing here, writing, but I put it off until “I could afford it.” Now most passion is spent, most of that light that could change random thoughts into gold is gone. Do I exaggerate? I don’t think so. Most scientific breakthroughs were made when men and women were young; the same is true of great art, literature, and music.
Now, I know I said earlier you should listen to your gut. I repeat it now because your gut is that voice that bombards your senses. It is that nudge from inside that speaks to you. It would be wise to give it a listen.
I work harder now at my writing than I ever did at a well paying job with much less to show for it economically. That may surprise you but it is true.
The irony is that had I started a writing career when I was nineteen as a professor advised me this would all be academic. For you see, do what you love and the money will follow. I don’t need the money now so I am content to entertain myself by scribbling.
* * *
THE IMPORTANCE OF LUCK
It is safe to say that I have had more than my share of luck in life.
In fact I have often fallen into things. For starters, I was born at the right time in the right place with the right industries opening up, while the world was exploding in Post-WWII expansionism.
I also developed the right skill base at the right time when there was a demand for such skills. Again, through the encouragement of a mentor, I managed to get a Ph.D. when such alphabetic letters after your name got people to take you seriously.
I would like to end this cliché driven conversation with yet another cliché:
Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
My mother once told me that I was insecure. I would have to agree. It is why I am so self-centered. Alan W. Watts taught me the wisdom of insecurity. My mother had no idea who Watts was. She knew there was only one way for me to deal with my insecurity, and that was by being prepared. I took her advice to heart.
Luck is always out there waiting to be grasped like a brass ring. Luck demands that we do our best and accept the consequences of the doing, that we treat ourselves as our best friend by being kind and understanding of our limitations. This is the only way to be sincerely kind to others.
When you see people who are hard on others, count on them being much harder on themselves. Kindness is a virtue of self-acceptance.
Finally, life was meant to be our story, a story that others can build on, like I hope you can build on mine.
With love,
Your Bumpa
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 13, 2010
* * *
When the sun is setting on a long satisfying day, it is easy to forget how it rose with worrying uncertainties. The same could be said for a life. Every life is an adventure with a story to tell.
Recently, I had a brief visit with one of my grandsons, a college bound young man I see far too little of as he lives up north. He has grown tall and straight, quiet but funny, with an engaging personality and a captivating smile.
It has not been an easy road to his eighteen years. He has seen more of life than a young person should and still remain wholesome but he has. If anyone deserves to find happiness, and to succeed in life, he does. He has paid his dues.
What is most engaging about him, he doesn’t consider his situation unique. Nor does he believe it makes him special. It doesn’t. It does imbue him, however, with maturity rare for his generation.
He has been forced by circumstances to make the most of difficult circumstances, and to take nothing or anybody much less anything for granted. He is light years ahead of most eighteen-year-olds. So, I felt somewhat taken aback when he asked me what was the key to my success.
It is easy to wax philosophical with this ambivalent word, success, and sidestep the failures and regrets that have been part of the journey.
That said it was clear he wanted something to grab hold of when only truisms came to mind. He knows little of our family history, of the mainly accidental journey through which I, and now he have sprung from our mainly Irish family tree.
I sat there wondering what to say, realizing I have enjoyed an incredibly blessed life often despite rather than because of what I am. How to share this? I told him I could only express what seemed to work for me. “That is what I want to hear, bumpa,” he said.
* * *
THE IMPORTANCE OF PASSION
The most important thing to have is passion for what you do. Passion not only energizes you but fills your body and soul with spiritual health that sustains you when the unexpected occurs, or when the inevitable disappointment throws you off stride.
Passion is not the drive to become but the satisfaction of being who you are where you are doing what you are doing.
The purpose of life at every stage is what you are doing, not what you plan to do or hope to become but what you are doing right now.
Passion fills your body and soul with joy. Consider this. You work on something with all your being. It can be a sport, a project at school or around the house, anything that drains you to the limits of your energy. How do you feel? Exhausted? Of course.
You take a shower; feeling clean inside and out, refreshed, satisfied knowing you have done your best. Something happens. You start to feel your energy returning. You see everything more clearly. You are ready to go forward, ready to accept the consequences of your investment in time, energy, and sacrifice.
There is a simple formula that describes this:
PAIN + RISK = GROWTH
From the time we are small, we like to stand against the wall and see how much we have grown since the last time we measured ourselves. Growth is important to us. It is easy for us to think of growth in terms of our physical stature. It is less easy for us to think of growth in terms of our mental, psychological, emotional and moral stature.
Early on, we have a passion for things, a passion to dress ourselves, to do what we like, yes, and to do what we are told not to do.
We see others older than we are and want to be, do, and enjoy what they are allowed to do. We want to imitate them and to derive the benefits they have amassed by simply being older. We don’t see who and what and how they are in terms of passion much less pain and risk. We see them only in terms of what they are allowed to do versus the way we are treated.
The pain of growing physically is something everyone experiences. Yet even physical growth involves risks that either enhance that growth or retard it. You are eighteen and have seen more than most teenagers have seen in terms of how taking risks that are not life enhancing can retard your physical well being, and more importantly, can damage that precious mind of yours.
A life is a terrible thing to waste, true, but even that idea is subjective. If you are following your passions, whatever they are, your life will not be wasted.
Some may say you should be this or that because otherwise “you are wasting your talent.” Implied in this is that you are wasting your life. A life that follows its passions is like a plant that seeks the nourishment of the sun, settles in nutrient soil, and an enhancing climate for growth.
The problem with this is that that sun, that soil and that climate become revealed to us, if we have the alertness to heed that revelation, which occurs in a series of tectonic shifts in our experience. It is almost like osmosis. It permeates our temperament, in most cases, with an ultimate epiphany, but it has been working to that moment from the beginning.
You tell me you have no idea what you want to be. That is all right. Listen to your gut; yes, I said your gut. It will tell you if you are on the path of your passions. That means you must pay attention to what gives you satisfaction, to what puts a sparkle in your eye, and a bounce in your step. There is no honest work that is not worthy of passion. There is no honest vocation that is not worthy of passion. There is no fulfilling relationship, despite what others may tell you is wrong for you, that is not worthy of passion.
Passion has no interest in competing and comparing. Passion has no interest in being what everyone else says is important. Passion has no interest in celebrity, in making people envious, in stimulating admiration. Passion is all about the effective utilization of your inherent ability in the service of others, which is the best way to serve yourself.
* * *
THE IMPORTANCE OF DEVELOPING A SKILL BASE
Your grandfather has had a passion for ideas and learning all his life. When he was a little boy, he was surrounded by men who never stayed in school very long, who hated school, hated formal education, thought reading books was effeminate, thought that the world was against them because of their ethnicity and religion.
They were of the opinion that the die was cast, that they were of a class and cast system with no options other than to gather around the kitchen table smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee complaining of how they were exploited at work by their bosses.
They talked in stereotypes. I didn’t know what that word meant but they repeated it enough that it stuck in my mind. “All rich people were corrupt.” "All politicians were crooks except President Roosevelt.” “All pious people were hiding something.” “People who dressed to the nines were putting on airs.” “All people with fancy homes were trying to keep up with the Joneses.”
Sitting around that kitchen table in gossipy collusion they seemed to derive pleasure from the practice. I noticed my mother, who was hard of hearing, poured coffee and cut pieces of fudge cake for them, and emptied their ashtrays but didn’t say anything. In fact, my da seemed to enjoy the company with no need to participate. I found that odd.
It was my mother who broke me out of my trance. She became my coach, counselor, mentor and friend pointing out the importance of a “skill base.” She didn’t use that expression. She talked of how I was to escape the kitchen table. My mother did not look at things in sophisticated language, but in earthy, pragmatic and perceptive ways.
It may seem cold but nonetheless true. She saw me as a commodity for sale, an amorphous bit of protoplasm with certain possibilities that would take nurturing and grooming. She started on me from the age of five when she came into my life after spending much of those earlier years in hospital.
It started with my appearance; the way I looked carried myself spoke and even walked. She said, “You are going to be tall, good looking, with a massive body that people cannot help but notice. Don’t ever forget that.” Well, of course, I did and paid for the trouble. But she was right about presence. It counts for more than it should.
My mother was a reader, a fast reader. She could read a book a day, smoking her cigarettes and drinking her coffee. Since she had poor hearing, it might have been compensation for that fact. In any case, she persuaded me that books had power and would open my mind to see itself, naked.
She told me that life was not a career, but a series of jobs. The first real job of a child, she said, was attending school. “If you don’t have a passion for school,” she said, “it is unlikely you will have much of a passion for other jobs.” She added, “Don’t blame your poor performance on your teachers. The most important teacher you will ever have is yourself. Pay attention to that teacher.”
This made little sense to me at the time. I asked her to explain. “What happens in school when you are prepared when Sister (the nun at St. Patrick's School) calls on you?”
Puzzled, I said, “I answer.”
“What is Sister’s expression?”
Still puzzled, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Does she smile? Does she compliment you?”
“She smiles.”
My mother lights a cigarette on the butt of the one in her mouth. “Progress, Jimmy, is a series of smiles and frowns in every job you will ever have. The more smiles you can produce the greater the progress you will make, and the greater the progress you make the more freedom you will enjoy.”
“Does da cause a lot of smiles?”
“Jimmy, and I don’t expect you to understand this, but your father is one of those people that has never reached the level of smiles or frowns. He is taken for granted and treated that way.”
“You are right. I don’t understand.”
“What I’m trying to say is he is not treated as a person because he could disappear tomorrow and nothing would change and nobody would miss him other than us.”
I started to cry because I had seen instances in my own presence when he was treated poorly. Anger welled up in me. I had a temper. My mother watched me through a smoker’s haze.
“You look like your father right now.” I wondered if that was good or bad. “He gets upset, which is all right if you know why you’re upset, and do something about it, but he doesn’t. Anger is not bad if you know what caused it. It is my job to help you use your anger to bring more smiles than frowns to those that have authority over you.”
* * *
Now, why am I telling you this?
It wasn’t until I came back from South Africa in 1969, half a life ago, that I realized that my drive, my passion, the multifaceted skill base that I had developed that put me in such demand was not a matter of my self-invention as I had thought. It was a result of the attention of my mother.
I, as a parent, thought my job was to create an affluent climate in which my children would find their own way, as I thought I had found mine. How arrogant.
I had forgotten those conversations with my mother, forgotten her prodding, of saying when I came home from school with three A’s and a B, that it wasn’t four A’s.
I never urged my children on as she had me. I left your mother and your uncles and aunt on their own, on what I guess could be called automatic pilot. I did them a disservice. They found their own way, but without my help. My mother installed a moral compass in me, a direction finder. Do my children have such a guidance system? I don’t think so.
My mother’s wisdom and drive contributed much to my surprisingly easy life. Some may say she lived through me, and perhaps she did The point is she understood her son’s personality was much like his father’s, and therefore knew that she had her work cut out for her to see her son got more smiles than frowns.
Discipline, direction, pain and risk, and making choices that enhanced what I had to offer came because of the compass my mother installed in me. You have had to install yours in yourself. That is admirable, and much more rare.
* * *
THE POWER OF PERSONALITY
It is a gift to be liked by most people as you are, to be able to make them laugh and feel comfortable and not threatened, to take pleasure in seeing you succeed and being happy for you.
You could have a chip on your shoulder but you don’t. In that sense, you are the superior of your grandfather. I say this to give you some sense of how I’ve handicapped myself with my personality whereas you have not. I confess that I think personality is rated much higher than it should be. I would prefer it be in balance with our essence, that is, our talent. That said we tend to surround ourselves with people like us, which exaggerates our weaknesses at the expense of our strengths.
Over the years, I have hired people and interviewed many more as part of an interviewing team. I have always rated competence higher than personality. Stated another way, being qualified for the job has been my primary interest.
My colleagues often differed with me on this seeing the most important criteria:
(1) Being comfortable with the person, and
(2) Seeing the person fitting in the organization as it is.
Once these criteria were satisfied they assured themselves that the person was also qualified or that he or she would prove to be so in time.
It should then come as little surprise that performance appraisals, promotions and raises were likewise associated with these same criteria.
I am speaking to the choir, I know, because you have already worked this out. You listen, study, observe and absorb information with a smile without saying anything, or you make a joke to relax others, and not appear threatening.
Even so, there will be some people who will be more comfortable with you than others. It is not always the people with whom we are most comfortable that are best for us.
For example, I appreciate people with ideas. I am attracted to people who question things, but they don’t always like me to question their thinking. They may withdraw, go silent, and no longer seek my input much less my questioning mind. That is all right with me. I still contact them. Why? I appreciate their minds. I’m not interested in their approval. To put it another way, I’m not looking for friends or to influence people. I’m looking to learn. Ideas turn me on.
You are a social person and like the company of friends. Choose friends, as my mother would say, wisely, that is, that enhance you as you are and as the person you want to be. Your grandfather’s friends are primarily ideas, and ideas are often in books, ideas often of people who no longer walk this earth.
It took South Africa for this to register. I love privacy and the freedom to think in the loving company of your grandmother Betty. It has nothing to do with me being a good or great thinker. It has everything to do with the person I am and choose to be. There are no absolutes in this calculus, only the flawed personification of the personal. Ultimately, life is all about choices.
* * *
THE POWER OF BEING
We have this idea that security is the end all, that we should do everything to enhance our security. We as a society have given up much of our freedom and privacy for this security. We even stay in jobs we hate because of security. We think one day we can embrace the security of retirement when we have never found time to live. .
The greatest threat to being is not security. That is like putting the cart before the horse. The greatest threat to being is fear of life.
So, many people work themselves to death; burn the candle at both ends to keep their stress levels down, and then limp into old age broken in body and spirit needing transplants or a score of prescription drugs to keep them vertical.
You are a good listener. I have not always been one. Several people along the way told me I should be doing what I’m doing here, writing, but I put it off until “I could afford it.” Now most passion is spent, most of that light that could change random thoughts into gold is gone. Do I exaggerate? I don’t think so. Most scientific breakthroughs were made when men and women were young; the same is true of great art, literature, and music.
Now, I know I said earlier you should listen to your gut. I repeat it now because your gut is that voice that bombards your senses. It is that nudge from inside that speaks to you. It would be wise to give it a listen.
I work harder now at my writing than I ever did at a well paying job with much less to show for it economically. That may surprise you but it is true.
The irony is that had I started a writing career when I was nineteen as a professor advised me this would all be academic. For you see, do what you love and the money will follow. I don’t need the money now so I am content to entertain myself by scribbling.
* * *
THE IMPORTANCE OF LUCK
It is safe to say that I have had more than my share of luck in life.
In fact I have often fallen into things. For starters, I was born at the right time in the right place with the right industries opening up, while the world was exploding in Post-WWII expansionism.
I also developed the right skill base at the right time when there was a demand for such skills. Again, through the encouragement of a mentor, I managed to get a Ph.D. when such alphabetic letters after your name got people to take you seriously.
I would like to end this cliché driven conversation with yet another cliché:
Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
My mother once told me that I was insecure. I would have to agree. It is why I am so self-centered. Alan W. Watts taught me the wisdom of insecurity. My mother had no idea who Watts was. She knew there was only one way for me to deal with my insecurity, and that was by being prepared. I took her advice to heart.
Luck is always out there waiting to be grasped like a brass ring. Luck demands that we do our best and accept the consequences of the doing, that we treat ourselves as our best friend by being kind and understanding of our limitations. This is the only way to be sincerely kind to others.
When you see people who are hard on others, count on them being much harder on themselves. Kindness is a virtue of self-acceptance.
Finally, life was meant to be our story, a story that others can build on, like I hope you can build on mine.
With love,
Your Bumpa
Thursday, October 07, 2010
WHY A NEGATIVE CAN SOMETIMES BE THE ONLY POSITIVE!
WHY A NEGATIVE CAN SOMETIMES BE THE ONLY POSITIVE!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 7, 2010
“We have to rip open this two-party duopoly and have it challenged by a serious third party that will talk about education reform, without worrying about offending unions; financial reform, without worrying about losing donations from Wall Street; corporate tax reductions to stimulate jobs, without worrying about offending the left; energy and climate reform, without worrying about offending the far right and coal-state Democrats; and proper health care reform, without worrying about offending insurers and drug companies.”
Thomas Friedman, “Third party rising is the cure for America’s sinking,” St. Petersburg Times, October 5, 2010, op-ed page.
* * *
When I came back from South Africa in 1969; having experienced what I thought was the nadir of civilization in apartheid, the United States of Anxiety was fully in play as America had clearly lost its moral compass and its way.
Antonio Damasio writes in “Descartes’ Error” (2006) that the human personality can change if subjected to physical damage to the frontal lobe and limbic system. The frontal lobe is the seat of intelligence. The limbic system is the site of emotions. Society is organic as much as the individual. The frontal lobe of American society in 1968, while I was away in South Africa, appeared to be racked with indecisive leadership (frontal lobe) having caved in to institutional emotional instability (limbic system).
* * *
The American personality as well as the Western world’s had the vibration of an earthquake in 1968, shattering its collective confidence and well-documented hubris. The unpopular and enigmatic Viet Nam War was going nowhere. The USS Pueblo was captured in North Korean waters, which became a Manchurian dance from January to December when the crew was finally released. The Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive, which was a further embarrassment to that war. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Young people burned their draft cards and then rushed off to the sanctuary of Canada. College campuses became combat zones with Columbia students seizing university buildings. Hundreds were injured in a Paris uprising. Robert Kennedy was assassinated. People marched on Washington, D.C. Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, ending the Prague spring of peace. Riots broke out at the Democratic Presidential Nominating Convention in Chicago. The theater of the absurd continued at the Republican’s convention in Miami. Olympic Games in Mexico found two black American athletes raising black-gloved fists in defiance when the American National Anthem was played, as they were awarded gold and bronze medals.
Lance Morrow mused, “Like a knife blade, 1968 was severed past from future.”
* * *
Meanwhile, South Africa, colonial Brits, intransigent Afrikaners and the government’s policy of apartheid were severing my staid belief system and programmed personality from its moorings. I came out of South Africa a different person than I went in, only to find the United States and the world had a different identity and disposition as well as 1969 rolled around.
* * *
Those eighteen in 1968, whose proclamation was “trust no one over thirty, are now sixty and have spawned the spoiled brat generation. Baby boomers” burned the candle at both ends in self-indulgent lifestyles, leading to escalating medical conditions such as diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver, emphysema, strokes, heart attacks, hypertension, and other socially associated illnesses. These conditions led to skyrocketing insurance claims and therefore rising insurance premiums.
It didn’t stop there. Baby boomers mimicked their spoiled brat offspring not wanting to ever grow old and therefore never having to grow up. Bionic man and woman became an industry with one plastic surgeon for every 50,000 citizens with such procedures as nose reshaping, eyelifts, tummy tucks, breast implants or breast reductions (yes, for men, too!), dermabrasions, and collagen injections.
The 2008 economic meltdown, which Main Street blamed Wall Street, and Wall Street blamed Main Street, was a collusion of baby boomers and spoiled brats on both sides of the equation. Main Street constantly reminded itself how clever it was in buying houses it couldn’t afford and living lifestyles financed by credit card debt. Wall Street constantly reminded itself how smart it was in creating credit instruments that had little or no value, but made its people rich.
Incredibly, the citizen and the nation in 2010 submerged in debt, a slave to creditors such as China, still remains defiantly confident that this too will pass.
* * *
The past forty years have had a particular interest to me. This is partly due to my diverse international experience and being a child of the Great Depression. I am not qualified to measure the gravitas of these years in the historic sense, but I have a personal perspective that takes in our changing national psyche and my own shifting personality as a result of this experience. In a strange way, the system not the individual establishes the calculus. I am now attempting to write a novel of this experience.
After South Africa, I no longer bought the American rhetoric, the flag waving, our hubristic insularity, our self-righteousness, or even the idea that God is always on our side. It has not made me a popular writer, but you see that is something else that was a product of South Africa, I no longer cared. I saw my fellow Americans as a people like people everywhere with similar sins, misgivings and false appetites, but almost a total inability to recognize much less face such facts.
* * *
After South Africa, I did something radical. I retired although only in my mid-thirties. I read books on philosophy and religion, played tennis, and wandered about the Tampa Bay area, watching people and writing poetry. I dreamed of an early death mesmerized by John Doone’s poetry on suicide. I was aimless, purposeless and obviously a wounded warrior. What broke me out of the trance was a book that I wrote in six weeks and was accepted without portfolio or an agent the same week it was received. It became a national best seller, and was in print for twenty years.
One of my tennis partners, a professor, talked me into going back to school. I did what philosopher Alan W. Watts did only he did it successfully. I interviewed with professors at the university and suggested they accept me into the doctorate program without messing around with the established rites of passage to a Ph.D., or its venerated curriculum “because I read a lot.” You can imagine my reception.
For the next six years, year around, starting out taking undergraduate courses in psychology and sociology, I had to work my way into graduate school. Then I had to deal with professors who weren’t used to a student with real life experience who would challenge their modalities, methodologies and theories. Often I felt better informed than they were in their own disciplines. It is something of a miracle that I survived that dance, and was able to qualify and then write my Ph.D. dissertation, after having a bumpy road defending my master’s thesis.
It has been my experience that academics are often appalling writers. Since we think in language, I assumed naively academics, guardians of our intellectual heritage, could express what they thought and believed. I have come to believe instead that writers are not made but born. I have been a writer since age of five. How else can one explain why more than half of the students who complete their graduate course work to qualify for the Ph.D. are what is called “ABD’s,” or having all but dissertations?
* * *
I found university education, now as a mature student, not unlike a factory industry, with a designated assembly line, set curriculum, and a selected product, and that product, not necessarily a measure of its relevance and competence in the real world, but a product passionately defended with bureaucratic certitude in seeing that the student filled all the necessary boxes. Graduate education was a disappointment to me mainly because it was essentially a closed “telling” environment and not an open “learning” culture. Professors thought since they had the grade and the clout that they had all the answers, too.
* * *
This past Sunday (October 3, 2010), I spent three hours watching and listening to theoretical physicist Michio Kahu of City College of New York (C-Span2), a remarkably learned man, popularizer of science, and a veritable industry of best selling books, television appearances, and a weekly radio show, which he claimed repeatedly carries him on 130 radio stations. My wonder is this infotainment the best application of his genius.
Some listener must have been reading my mind when he asked how many patents Dr. Kahu had. The answer was none. I have a friend that few readers know, William L. Livingston IV, who has more than one hundred. Is science meant to be eye candy or something that rises out of the bowls of our passions? Kahu, for me, is selling eye candy.
* * *
During my second academic career, I consulted on the side across the nation working mainly for the American Management Association conducting seminars of leaders in the public and private sector, and doing interventions up and down the Atlantic seaboard from 1970 to 1980.
Also, during that period (1970 – 1980), I was an adjunct professor at several universities teaching in the MBA Programs. The majority of my students possessed technical educations (physics, chemistry, engineering), but felt the need to get economically ahead by abandoning their chosen professions by becoming managers.
Until this teaching experience, I had no idea how compliant, naïve, and poorly educated were my technically educated colleagues when it came to writing and expressing themselves clearly. It would seem they took pride in not writing well, never having read a novel, or of having an abhorrence of history. Anything that smacked of culture was suspect.
These professionals were perfect candidates for the brainwashing curriculum of an MBA program. A surprising number of major American companies are run by engineers with these MBA’s, many of them running them into the ground.
Engineering is a conformist discipline, as it is true of all science curriculums to a point, as there is too much to learn and too little time to contemplate the nuances of engineering and science much less the merits or relevance of the engineering curriculum when the main focus is the degree.
Consequently, the mindset of the workplace culture in particular and the business model in general is a reification of such programming, a close system of business as usual in an infallible institutional system. I have made an effort to point this out, not because of my lack of respect for the engineers and scientists, but to make them aware of their blindside (see my article, “The Lost Soul of the Engineer, Short-Circuit, Spring 1993).
The United States has the world’s best university system, but it is producing conforming rather than thinking individuals who drift to climates and cultures that protect their status quo at the expense of a changing world that demands more from them. No, I am not impressed with this digital age, especially if it means leaving our mindset in limbo.
* * *
As a consultant, it became apparent that I was a pawn that these interventions were meant to quiet critics in the public sector, and the troops and stakeholders in the private sector. Little action was likely to occur as a result of the recommendations submitted.
One of my clients was in the high tech industry, which I decided to join when the opportunity presented itself. My motivation was to see if I could change this calculus. Alas, I couldn’t. The bureaucracy in the private sector was as firmly established as in the public sector, especially in a department and discipline called “Human Resources.”
I got on well with my some 4,000 clients in this organization, but less well with the 64 people in the HR department. In the 1980s, the complex organization, like the wider culture, was in transition if not transformation. It still is. I found this equally true when I was promoted to the company’s operation in Europe during the early days (late 1980s) of the new European Economic Community.
European culture and industry had perfected the American model of bureaucratic rigidity (“stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn’t face them, and left the future up for grabs”), which I attempted to capture in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007).
* * *
In 1990, I retired for the second time knocking out a series of books designed to reveal what I saw from the perspective of an interventionist in the United States and Europe. I have supplemented this with published articles in trade journals and periodical, as well as in a series of missives on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com).
* * *
This brings me to the purpose of this missive. Much of what I have written could be construed as cast in the negative. It is negative, which we seemingly insist in ignoring or rejecting out of hand, that the positive resides. You cannot have the positive without the negative or the negative without the positive. They are part of the same whole.
* * *.
Robert Woodard in his new book “The Obama War” (2010) shares his frustration with things as they are, which are quite negative, wishing that he had in his other books been more insistent in exploring the negative in all its dimensions. “I am a whistle blower,” he now insists. He shows in this work that the president and his generals are not on the same page, nor is the president and his cabinet in sync, nor, indeed, is Congress at the top of its game preoccupied in partisan politics. Woodard is a powerful writer and person of clout, but he wonders if anyone is listening?
* * *
Before South Africa and 1968, I was a pleaser, worried about what people thought of me, wanted to belong, to be accepted, and to be appreciated. South Africa changed me. I’m not saying it was for the better or worse, but I am saying it opened my eyes to the fact that the world didn’t revolve around me, or that the United States was not the center of the galaxy. This was strangely liberating. Woodard aims at a similar liberation in his writing. My aim is a little less grand. I want to introduce you to yourself.
* * *
Lewis Mumford (1895 – 1990) wrote in “The Condition of Man” (1944) this about Rome:
“Everyone aimed at security; no one accepted responsibility. What was plainly lacking, long before the barbarian invasions had done their work, long before economic dislocations became serious was an inner go, Rome’s life was now an imitation of life; a mere holding on. Security was the watchword, as if life knew any other stability than through constant change, or any form of security except through a constant willingness to take risks.”
The more things change the more they remain the same. Mumford could be writing about the United States and today’s society, as man seems to have to be pushed to the brink before he changes course. This historian wrote many books warning society on the course it was taking. We can quote him today for the little use it is. Likewise, we can read the peripatetic journalist Thomas Friedman, who is quoted in the beginning of this missive. We can see how entertaining the negative is as a way to establish the positive in action.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 7, 2010
“We have to rip open this two-party duopoly and have it challenged by a serious third party that will talk about education reform, without worrying about offending unions; financial reform, without worrying about losing donations from Wall Street; corporate tax reductions to stimulate jobs, without worrying about offending the left; energy and climate reform, without worrying about offending the far right and coal-state Democrats; and proper health care reform, without worrying about offending insurers and drug companies.”
Thomas Friedman, “Third party rising is the cure for America’s sinking,” St. Petersburg Times, October 5, 2010, op-ed page.
* * *
When I came back from South Africa in 1969; having experienced what I thought was the nadir of civilization in apartheid, the United States of Anxiety was fully in play as America had clearly lost its moral compass and its way.
Antonio Damasio writes in “Descartes’ Error” (2006) that the human personality can change if subjected to physical damage to the frontal lobe and limbic system. The frontal lobe is the seat of intelligence. The limbic system is the site of emotions. Society is organic as much as the individual. The frontal lobe of American society in 1968, while I was away in South Africa, appeared to be racked with indecisive leadership (frontal lobe) having caved in to institutional emotional instability (limbic system).
* * *
The American personality as well as the Western world’s had the vibration of an earthquake in 1968, shattering its collective confidence and well-documented hubris. The unpopular and enigmatic Viet Nam War was going nowhere. The USS Pueblo was captured in North Korean waters, which became a Manchurian dance from January to December when the crew was finally released. The Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive, which was a further embarrassment to that war. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Young people burned their draft cards and then rushed off to the sanctuary of Canada. College campuses became combat zones with Columbia students seizing university buildings. Hundreds were injured in a Paris uprising. Robert Kennedy was assassinated. People marched on Washington, D.C. Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, ending the Prague spring of peace. Riots broke out at the Democratic Presidential Nominating Convention in Chicago. The theater of the absurd continued at the Republican’s convention in Miami. Olympic Games in Mexico found two black American athletes raising black-gloved fists in defiance when the American National Anthem was played, as they were awarded gold and bronze medals.
Lance Morrow mused, “Like a knife blade, 1968 was severed past from future.”
* * *
Meanwhile, South Africa, colonial Brits, intransigent Afrikaners and the government’s policy of apartheid were severing my staid belief system and programmed personality from its moorings. I came out of South Africa a different person than I went in, only to find the United States and the world had a different identity and disposition as well as 1969 rolled around.
* * *
Those eighteen in 1968, whose proclamation was “trust no one over thirty, are now sixty and have spawned the spoiled brat generation. Baby boomers” burned the candle at both ends in self-indulgent lifestyles, leading to escalating medical conditions such as diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver, emphysema, strokes, heart attacks, hypertension, and other socially associated illnesses. These conditions led to skyrocketing insurance claims and therefore rising insurance premiums.
It didn’t stop there. Baby boomers mimicked their spoiled brat offspring not wanting to ever grow old and therefore never having to grow up. Bionic man and woman became an industry with one plastic surgeon for every 50,000 citizens with such procedures as nose reshaping, eyelifts, tummy tucks, breast implants or breast reductions (yes, for men, too!), dermabrasions, and collagen injections.
The 2008 economic meltdown, which Main Street blamed Wall Street, and Wall Street blamed Main Street, was a collusion of baby boomers and spoiled brats on both sides of the equation. Main Street constantly reminded itself how clever it was in buying houses it couldn’t afford and living lifestyles financed by credit card debt. Wall Street constantly reminded itself how smart it was in creating credit instruments that had little or no value, but made its people rich.
Incredibly, the citizen and the nation in 2010 submerged in debt, a slave to creditors such as China, still remains defiantly confident that this too will pass.
* * *
The past forty years have had a particular interest to me. This is partly due to my diverse international experience and being a child of the Great Depression. I am not qualified to measure the gravitas of these years in the historic sense, but I have a personal perspective that takes in our changing national psyche and my own shifting personality as a result of this experience. In a strange way, the system not the individual establishes the calculus. I am now attempting to write a novel of this experience.
After South Africa, I no longer bought the American rhetoric, the flag waving, our hubristic insularity, our self-righteousness, or even the idea that God is always on our side. It has not made me a popular writer, but you see that is something else that was a product of South Africa, I no longer cared. I saw my fellow Americans as a people like people everywhere with similar sins, misgivings and false appetites, but almost a total inability to recognize much less face such facts.
* * *
After South Africa, I did something radical. I retired although only in my mid-thirties. I read books on philosophy and religion, played tennis, and wandered about the Tampa Bay area, watching people and writing poetry. I dreamed of an early death mesmerized by John Doone’s poetry on suicide. I was aimless, purposeless and obviously a wounded warrior. What broke me out of the trance was a book that I wrote in six weeks and was accepted without portfolio or an agent the same week it was received. It became a national best seller, and was in print for twenty years.
One of my tennis partners, a professor, talked me into going back to school. I did what philosopher Alan W. Watts did only he did it successfully. I interviewed with professors at the university and suggested they accept me into the doctorate program without messing around with the established rites of passage to a Ph.D., or its venerated curriculum “because I read a lot.” You can imagine my reception.
For the next six years, year around, starting out taking undergraduate courses in psychology and sociology, I had to work my way into graduate school. Then I had to deal with professors who weren’t used to a student with real life experience who would challenge their modalities, methodologies and theories. Often I felt better informed than they were in their own disciplines. It is something of a miracle that I survived that dance, and was able to qualify and then write my Ph.D. dissertation, after having a bumpy road defending my master’s thesis.
It has been my experience that academics are often appalling writers. Since we think in language, I assumed naively academics, guardians of our intellectual heritage, could express what they thought and believed. I have come to believe instead that writers are not made but born. I have been a writer since age of five. How else can one explain why more than half of the students who complete their graduate course work to qualify for the Ph.D. are what is called “ABD’s,” or having all but dissertations?
* * *
I found university education, now as a mature student, not unlike a factory industry, with a designated assembly line, set curriculum, and a selected product, and that product, not necessarily a measure of its relevance and competence in the real world, but a product passionately defended with bureaucratic certitude in seeing that the student filled all the necessary boxes. Graduate education was a disappointment to me mainly because it was essentially a closed “telling” environment and not an open “learning” culture. Professors thought since they had the grade and the clout that they had all the answers, too.
* * *
This past Sunday (October 3, 2010), I spent three hours watching and listening to theoretical physicist Michio Kahu of City College of New York (C-Span2), a remarkably learned man, popularizer of science, and a veritable industry of best selling books, television appearances, and a weekly radio show, which he claimed repeatedly carries him on 130 radio stations. My wonder is this infotainment the best application of his genius.
Some listener must have been reading my mind when he asked how many patents Dr. Kahu had. The answer was none. I have a friend that few readers know, William L. Livingston IV, who has more than one hundred. Is science meant to be eye candy or something that rises out of the bowls of our passions? Kahu, for me, is selling eye candy.
* * *
During my second academic career, I consulted on the side across the nation working mainly for the American Management Association conducting seminars of leaders in the public and private sector, and doing interventions up and down the Atlantic seaboard from 1970 to 1980.
Also, during that period (1970 – 1980), I was an adjunct professor at several universities teaching in the MBA Programs. The majority of my students possessed technical educations (physics, chemistry, engineering), but felt the need to get economically ahead by abandoning their chosen professions by becoming managers.
Until this teaching experience, I had no idea how compliant, naïve, and poorly educated were my technically educated colleagues when it came to writing and expressing themselves clearly. It would seem they took pride in not writing well, never having read a novel, or of having an abhorrence of history. Anything that smacked of culture was suspect.
These professionals were perfect candidates for the brainwashing curriculum of an MBA program. A surprising number of major American companies are run by engineers with these MBA’s, many of them running them into the ground.
Engineering is a conformist discipline, as it is true of all science curriculums to a point, as there is too much to learn and too little time to contemplate the nuances of engineering and science much less the merits or relevance of the engineering curriculum when the main focus is the degree.
Consequently, the mindset of the workplace culture in particular and the business model in general is a reification of such programming, a close system of business as usual in an infallible institutional system. I have made an effort to point this out, not because of my lack of respect for the engineers and scientists, but to make them aware of their blindside (see my article, “The Lost Soul of the Engineer, Short-Circuit, Spring 1993).
The United States has the world’s best university system, but it is producing conforming rather than thinking individuals who drift to climates and cultures that protect their status quo at the expense of a changing world that demands more from them. No, I am not impressed with this digital age, especially if it means leaving our mindset in limbo.
* * *
As a consultant, it became apparent that I was a pawn that these interventions were meant to quiet critics in the public sector, and the troops and stakeholders in the private sector. Little action was likely to occur as a result of the recommendations submitted.
One of my clients was in the high tech industry, which I decided to join when the opportunity presented itself. My motivation was to see if I could change this calculus. Alas, I couldn’t. The bureaucracy in the private sector was as firmly established as in the public sector, especially in a department and discipline called “Human Resources.”
I got on well with my some 4,000 clients in this organization, but less well with the 64 people in the HR department. In the 1980s, the complex organization, like the wider culture, was in transition if not transformation. It still is. I found this equally true when I was promoted to the company’s operation in Europe during the early days (late 1980s) of the new European Economic Community.
European culture and industry had perfected the American model of bureaucratic rigidity (“stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn’t face them, and left the future up for grabs”), which I attempted to capture in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007).
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In 1990, I retired for the second time knocking out a series of books designed to reveal what I saw from the perspective of an interventionist in the United States and Europe. I have supplemented this with published articles in trade journals and periodical, as well as in a series of missives on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com).
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This brings me to the purpose of this missive. Much of what I have written could be construed as cast in the negative. It is negative, which we seemingly insist in ignoring or rejecting out of hand, that the positive resides. You cannot have the positive without the negative or the negative without the positive. They are part of the same whole.
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Robert Woodard in his new book “The Obama War” (2010) shares his frustration with things as they are, which are quite negative, wishing that he had in his other books been more insistent in exploring the negative in all its dimensions. “I am a whistle blower,” he now insists. He shows in this work that the president and his generals are not on the same page, nor is the president and his cabinet in sync, nor, indeed, is Congress at the top of its game preoccupied in partisan politics. Woodard is a powerful writer and person of clout, but he wonders if anyone is listening?
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Before South Africa and 1968, I was a pleaser, worried about what people thought of me, wanted to belong, to be accepted, and to be appreciated. South Africa changed me. I’m not saying it was for the better or worse, but I am saying it opened my eyes to the fact that the world didn’t revolve around me, or that the United States was not the center of the galaxy. This was strangely liberating. Woodard aims at a similar liberation in his writing. My aim is a little less grand. I want to introduce you to yourself.
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Lewis Mumford (1895 – 1990) wrote in “The Condition of Man” (1944) this about Rome:
“Everyone aimed at security; no one accepted responsibility. What was plainly lacking, long before the barbarian invasions had done their work, long before economic dislocations became serious was an inner go, Rome’s life was now an imitation of life; a mere holding on. Security was the watchword, as if life knew any other stability than through constant change, or any form of security except through a constant willingness to take risks.”
The more things change the more they remain the same. Mumford could be writing about the United States and today’s society, as man seems to have to be pushed to the brink before he changes course. This historian wrote many books warning society on the course it was taking. We can quote him today for the little use it is. Likewise, we can read the peripatetic journalist Thomas Friedman, who is quoted in the beginning of this missive. We can see how entertaining the negative is as a way to establish the positive in action.
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