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.

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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).

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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.

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