WONDERING ABOUT FORMAL RELIGIONS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 27, 2010
* * *
Not long ago, BB and I were having breakfast at the Village Inn in Tampa (Florida). The waiter noticed I had a copy of a book. It was “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran.
Gibran was a Lebanonese-American that lived many years in the United States, and wrote and illustrated his books with compelling almost ghostly like figures. He had studied in Paris, and had been mentored by the sculptor Auguste Rodin, famous for his sculpture of "The Thinker.”
“The Prophet” was first published in 1923 to a tepid critical recession but the book took hold in the 1960s during the counterculture revolution in the United States. This was more than thirty years after the author’s death. I’ve read some twenty books by the author first discovering him in 1969 when I returned from South Africa.
* * *
Gibran must have been popular with Ted Sorensen, writer for President John F. Kennedy, as he borrowed Gibran’s quote to his Labonese people, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”
* * *
“The Prophet” has never been out of print, while Gibran is the third best selling poet of all times, behind Shakespeare and Lao-Tzu, although you are not likely to find him in most biographical encyclopedias. Go figure.
* * *
In any case, the waiter was quite exercised that I had a book with a ghostly image of a man on the cover with the title, “The Prophet.” He considered it was blasphemy of his religion. I gave the young man the brief history of the book that I’ve shared with you here, and managed to calm him down before he did something stupid. I had not known when I entered the restaurant that a Muslim group had purchased the franchise nor did I anticipate that a book would have such a reaction. But I assure you it did.
* * *
Then I read in the St. Petersburg Times (November 26, 2010) that Asia Bibi in Karachi, Pakistan has been sentenced to die for insulting Islam. Bibi, who is a Christian, as was Gibran, has already been in prison for 17 months because Muslim women in her village accused her of speaking ill of the prophet Mohammed.
Others have been so accused and given a similar death sentence in Pakistan, but none has been executed according to government officials.
Gibran, who is often quoted, said, “Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only before the truth.” If it were only so. Gibran didn’t live long enough to see the nightmare of religious strife in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.
Of course, Christianity cannot take a seat in the bleachers to this religious strife by pointing an accusatory finger. There were terrible scourges in early American history including the Salem trials of Massachusetts. Then there is the Roman Catholic Inquisition of the twelfth and thirteenth century. Practically every religion on earth has punished non-believers within its cultural sphere with the possible exception of the Buddhists.
With the Inquisition, many were burned at the stake, perhaps the most famous being Joan of Arc in 1431 at the age of nineteen. Later in the fifteenth century, the Spanish Inquisition was established with its particular house of horrors for those accused of heresy to ensure orthodoxy. Moslems and Jews, who failed to convert to Christianity, were forced to leave the country.
So, Christians cannot look at what is happening in the Moslem world today and shake a finger. Christianity has blood on its hands, as does any religion that puts power and politics above human freedom and decency, and its stated mission of love.
* * *
Some writers to this blog have a problem understanding my approach to religion, asking if I am a Christian, do I believe in God, or what? I’ll admit here that I haven’t replied to these queries because I don’t think what I believe is relevant to the understanding of what and why they believe and behave as they do. True, I am a provocateur recording my wonderings for public consumption, debate and discourse. But I have no answers for anyone.
I will say this I do wonder what the world would be like if there were no discrete formal religions or ideologies. That is not meant to imply that I am selling the idea of a Universal Mind, God, or Universal Intelligence. I think stories in various religions are quite beautiful and appropriate to human conduct and our spiritual temperament. But there is too much we against them in all faiths, and all denominations of all faiths for my comfort.
It doesn’t seem especially charitable to judge then ostracize, demote, or punish someone who thinks or believes differently than you do. I’ve seen incompetent people go up the organizational tree primarily on the basis of this pyramid climbing technique.
Nor do I believe in proselytizing faiths, and that includes Christianity. Nor do I think Europeans with their Christian culture did native North, Central, South and Caribbean aborigines any favors by converting them to the Christian religion at the expense of their indigenous religions and cultures.
What I see happening today is natural law invading social behavior across continents and cultures. Eons ago, people didn’t realize how closely they were connected. They took comfort and shelter in sets of mythological ideas that held them together and gave them courage to go forward. Today, thanks to technology, with all that I despise about its first iterations of excess, we have no other option than to come to an understanding and acceptance of people of difference.
* * *
When I was a boy, there was a family in the neighborhood that was given no respect. The family was ignored like carriers of an untreatable disease. The family was in the community but not of it. Rather than accept its predicament, it drew attention to itself acting more and more bizarre.
Fifty years later, I was interviewing two members of this family for a book I was writing about life in the community in the 1940s. The wound of those earlier times was still apparent. “Why are you speaking to us now when you never spoke to us once when we were kids?”
The question surprised me. I sat there stupidly in silence. “All we wanted was a little respect. Was that asking too much?”
* * *
Respect is a spiritual food that quiets the soul and turns the mind to constructive as opposed to destructive avenues of expression. The problems throughout the world are a matter of power and politics, but behind those motivations are the water and oil of fear and disrespect. Nations behave like individuals when it comes down to core values. Religions rose out of the theatre of fear as a means to give spiritual direction to the soul. Now, they are often the cause of the perturbations. The best evidence is not only human conflagrations across the globe but evidence of our dying planet.
* * *
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
MORALITY IS IN THE MIND OF THE TIMES
MORALITY IS IN THE MIND OF THE TIMES
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 24, 2010
* * *
REFERENCE:
When I was in the US Navy on a ship in the Mediterranean in the late 1950s, we had an outbreak of the Asian flue. Eighty to ninety percent of our crew of 1,400 sailors was sick, seven died from the malady, forcing us to anchor at sea. I was a corpsman, a striker at that time, or of the lowest rank, and had to ran the 40-bed hospital, and manage the delivery of meals from the galley to sailors in their bunks. Only the doctor and I of a 36-man hospital division were able to work. I never got the flu nor did the doctor. Neither of us had taken the mandatory flu shot, and yet we treated very sick incapacitated people. This is in way of introduction to this missive.
* * *
AUTHOR WILLIAM L. LIVINGSTON WRITES (Reference to his reply to: “Why Do We Not Embrace What Is Good For Us?”):
Sir James,
Thanks for going to the trouble to respond to my query. Well done. Profound.
I only ask that you continue to look for a theory of the drivers of this ubiquity. As you know my propensities, it is frustrating to collect data points without knowing the efficient causes.
As the collection of examples grows to mountainous size, nothing points at the perpetrator. None of my mentors got near this matter. It's the elephant in the pantry, Sire. Significant in the extreme.
If the population is genetically endowed with this suicidal DNA, and I have no reason to question otherwise, why don't practitioners have it?
I spent most of my life ricocheting off the barriers of society and the only harm received is the chronic ache of nonstop learning and growth. I can play the game and blend in to the masses incognito as one fully culturally processed. It does not work the other way.
As you know, Ron Prichard has developed a gangbusters teaching scheme based on this ubiquity. His strategy works on the assumption that everyone in the class has a full complement of stories. His assumption has proven to be incontrovertible.
What he does is derive the theory (of the day) for the class, in lecture format. One way. Then he presents a set of carefully composed intermediate questions involving this theory (BTW Prichard hasn't yet figured out the structure he is using to do this). Lastly, he runs through the set of intermediate questions with the class, which is encouraged to falsify the theory (of the day). His part is done.
The class members then give their stories that either support or disconfirm the theory. Once that starts the class educates itself both on the ubiquity (a natural-law attribute) and the generalized theory itself. If a class member should tell a story of his experience that runs counter to the theory, the class immediately responds to the flaws in his story. Since everyone in the class has stories, there is focused attention on the recitals. Self-demonstration; self-learning.
As the theories are derived and tested, there comes a point where the class has enough theories of experience to decipher any story on their own. You can well imagine the impact that carries forward after the class disbands. True to form, class members never ask for further enlightenment. They know what happens to practitioners back home in the institution.
We 've got to crack that nut, Sir James.
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
There is a saying in Buddhism, “You cannot push the water.” As I say in the referred piece, we cannot change our stripes. Does that mean everyone has suicidal DNA? Freud would say, yes, only with some practitioners, in your parlance, it might be nascent or in remission. It is still there.
Ron Pritchard uses stories to get inside the heads of his students to illustrate variance, you add, “yet he hasn’t figured out the structure he is using to do this.” Perhaps there isn’t any, perhaps that is because it is fluid. We live in a fluid age. Put another way, perhaps what you would like identified is not a demonstrable law of nature but evidence of the dynamics of nature.
To illustrate my thinking, let us proceed calling stories “myths,” starting with a popular children’s story.
* * *
The hero of the “Toy Story” trilogy is a toy cowboy. In “Toy Story Three” when the toys belonging to Andy, now about to leave for college, find themselves at a daycare center, and a kindly bear welcomes them into a community of toys freed from their owners, the cowboy alone stays loyal to Andy. The toy bear turns out to be a dictator worse than any owner, proving the toy cowboy right for the solidarity of his loyalty.
It is just a Pixar animation, but like many subliminal injections into our culture, the daycare center could be taken to represent the public realm, Andy the private realm, the cowboy the hero because he stands for social values. Why make the hero a cowboy?
Could it be social values are old-fashioned like the cowboy hero who resolutely clings to that order? The cowboy riding off alone into the sunset wasn’t exactly a paragon of virtue. He was a Hollywood myth that grew into a genre in Western films in the 1950s.
It doesn’t matter that the West after the Civil War was not nearly as violent as depicted in film. Westerns tell a story of the meaning and management of violence in the establishment of social order and political authority. The plethora of “Law & Order,” police, crime, and legal dramas on television, in film and in books are adaptations of cowboy stories.
“Toy Story Three” recognizes the cowboy hero is a political figure, moving into new territory in America’s myth of individualism and going it alone. It propagates the myth that social values are in place, and now these values are in electronic space as the national story of the United States.
Being American from the beginning of our history has been essentially a political identification in a climate of real, potential or imagined violence. It is such a conflicting and contradictory state of affairs that holds us together as a nation, absent a long slow unfolding of tradition on a settled piece of real estate as is the case for Europe.
Americans live more in their heads than in their lives. Without a long settled past, but in a restless present, Americans live for and only in the future.
The frontier, from Jeffersonian natural democracy to Darwinian struggle for survival and power to pushing the envelope to the limits of mind, energy and resources, has been from the beginning an encounter between culture and nature.
It has involved movement from loosening and leveling the wilderness of our ways to a new civilized order in a never ending continued new beginning toward liberty and equality.
Along the way our culture has encountered savagery that has been well documented: Robber Barons employing thugs to break up union meetings, savaging women groups working for the vote, lynching blacks who looked at white women, organizing into the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society, savaging the Civil Rights Movement, and now savaging immigrants who cross the border illegally. Savagery disturbs the order of society but continuously opens it to the prospects of greater liberty and equality.
I’m dwelling on the cowboy myth because he is present in the Wall Street trader who act in reckless abandon telling investors one thing and doing another to his own enhancement, in the CEOs of oil companies who preach safety but practice risk taking to the brink of disaster, in the Congressmen who are more concerned about reelection than doing the people’s business, in members of the merchant, middle or working class who see themselves as cowboy hero warriors self-aggrandizing as they go forward unworried and disinclined to look back to note unintended consequences.
The Wall Street cowboy does what he does because to his mind it needs doing, silently without apology disappearing into the shadows, not honored, not mythologized, not remembered. This is not the cowboy of the Western legend, but his doppelganger with an opposite bent. He is the cowboy of the last sixty years.
The Western cowboy could not forgive the deceiver, the man willing without much visible struggling with his conscience to build his life into a lie. He would have exposed the hypocrisy of a society that dissembles its motivation in the guise of the law.
What I take from your communiqué is that Ron Pritchard presents the myth (stories) and the truth side by side for the benefit of all participants. He takes the view that participants look at the myth and truth and then decide. You may ask, how can participants once apprised of the truth decide in favor of the myth? Is it not possible to go on believing in a legend that has been exposed as false?
You cannot make people believe in something, even if it is in their own best interests, because the mind of our time is like an invisible hand urging people to walk to the end of the cliff, which they appear to be doing willingly.
You say we have got to crack that nut, but the nut is already cracked. The problem is that the many refuse to believe it so. They have to want what they need. They can be shown the way but they need not follow, especially if cowboys in the tradition of Hollywood myth. In the end, the most powerful force of all is the morality of the times, and that is not a happy dance at the moment.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 24, 2010
* * *
REFERENCE:
When I was in the US Navy on a ship in the Mediterranean in the late 1950s, we had an outbreak of the Asian flue. Eighty to ninety percent of our crew of 1,400 sailors was sick, seven died from the malady, forcing us to anchor at sea. I was a corpsman, a striker at that time, or of the lowest rank, and had to ran the 40-bed hospital, and manage the delivery of meals from the galley to sailors in their bunks. Only the doctor and I of a 36-man hospital division were able to work. I never got the flu nor did the doctor. Neither of us had taken the mandatory flu shot, and yet we treated very sick incapacitated people. This is in way of introduction to this missive.
* * *
AUTHOR WILLIAM L. LIVINGSTON WRITES (Reference to his reply to: “Why Do We Not Embrace What Is Good For Us?”):
Sir James,
Thanks for going to the trouble to respond to my query. Well done. Profound.
I only ask that you continue to look for a theory of the drivers of this ubiquity. As you know my propensities, it is frustrating to collect data points without knowing the efficient causes.
As the collection of examples grows to mountainous size, nothing points at the perpetrator. None of my mentors got near this matter. It's the elephant in the pantry, Sire. Significant in the extreme.
If the population is genetically endowed with this suicidal DNA, and I have no reason to question otherwise, why don't practitioners have it?
I spent most of my life ricocheting off the barriers of society and the only harm received is the chronic ache of nonstop learning and growth. I can play the game and blend in to the masses incognito as one fully culturally processed. It does not work the other way.
As you know, Ron Prichard has developed a gangbusters teaching scheme based on this ubiquity. His strategy works on the assumption that everyone in the class has a full complement of stories. His assumption has proven to be incontrovertible.
What he does is derive the theory (of the day) for the class, in lecture format. One way. Then he presents a set of carefully composed intermediate questions involving this theory (BTW Prichard hasn't yet figured out the structure he is using to do this). Lastly, he runs through the set of intermediate questions with the class, which is encouraged to falsify the theory (of the day). His part is done.
The class members then give their stories that either support or disconfirm the theory. Once that starts the class educates itself both on the ubiquity (a natural-law attribute) and the generalized theory itself. If a class member should tell a story of his experience that runs counter to the theory, the class immediately responds to the flaws in his story. Since everyone in the class has stories, there is focused attention on the recitals. Self-demonstration; self-learning.
As the theories are derived and tested, there comes a point where the class has enough theories of experience to decipher any story on their own. You can well imagine the impact that carries forward after the class disbands. True to form, class members never ask for further enlightenment. They know what happens to practitioners back home in the institution.
We 've got to crack that nut, Sir James.
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
There is a saying in Buddhism, “You cannot push the water.” As I say in the referred piece, we cannot change our stripes. Does that mean everyone has suicidal DNA? Freud would say, yes, only with some practitioners, in your parlance, it might be nascent or in remission. It is still there.
Ron Pritchard uses stories to get inside the heads of his students to illustrate variance, you add, “yet he hasn’t figured out the structure he is using to do this.” Perhaps there isn’t any, perhaps that is because it is fluid. We live in a fluid age. Put another way, perhaps what you would like identified is not a demonstrable law of nature but evidence of the dynamics of nature.
To illustrate my thinking, let us proceed calling stories “myths,” starting with a popular children’s story.
* * *
The hero of the “Toy Story” trilogy is a toy cowboy. In “Toy Story Three” when the toys belonging to Andy, now about to leave for college, find themselves at a daycare center, and a kindly bear welcomes them into a community of toys freed from their owners, the cowboy alone stays loyal to Andy. The toy bear turns out to be a dictator worse than any owner, proving the toy cowboy right for the solidarity of his loyalty.
It is just a Pixar animation, but like many subliminal injections into our culture, the daycare center could be taken to represent the public realm, Andy the private realm, the cowboy the hero because he stands for social values. Why make the hero a cowboy?
Could it be social values are old-fashioned like the cowboy hero who resolutely clings to that order? The cowboy riding off alone into the sunset wasn’t exactly a paragon of virtue. He was a Hollywood myth that grew into a genre in Western films in the 1950s.
It doesn’t matter that the West after the Civil War was not nearly as violent as depicted in film. Westerns tell a story of the meaning and management of violence in the establishment of social order and political authority. The plethora of “Law & Order,” police, crime, and legal dramas on television, in film and in books are adaptations of cowboy stories.
“Toy Story Three” recognizes the cowboy hero is a political figure, moving into new territory in America’s myth of individualism and going it alone. It propagates the myth that social values are in place, and now these values are in electronic space as the national story of the United States.
Being American from the beginning of our history has been essentially a political identification in a climate of real, potential or imagined violence. It is such a conflicting and contradictory state of affairs that holds us together as a nation, absent a long slow unfolding of tradition on a settled piece of real estate as is the case for Europe.
Americans live more in their heads than in their lives. Without a long settled past, but in a restless present, Americans live for and only in the future.
The frontier, from Jeffersonian natural democracy to Darwinian struggle for survival and power to pushing the envelope to the limits of mind, energy and resources, has been from the beginning an encounter between culture and nature.
It has involved movement from loosening and leveling the wilderness of our ways to a new civilized order in a never ending continued new beginning toward liberty and equality.
Along the way our culture has encountered savagery that has been well documented: Robber Barons employing thugs to break up union meetings, savaging women groups working for the vote, lynching blacks who looked at white women, organizing into the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society, savaging the Civil Rights Movement, and now savaging immigrants who cross the border illegally. Savagery disturbs the order of society but continuously opens it to the prospects of greater liberty and equality.
I’m dwelling on the cowboy myth because he is present in the Wall Street trader who act in reckless abandon telling investors one thing and doing another to his own enhancement, in the CEOs of oil companies who preach safety but practice risk taking to the brink of disaster, in the Congressmen who are more concerned about reelection than doing the people’s business, in members of the merchant, middle or working class who see themselves as cowboy hero warriors self-aggrandizing as they go forward unworried and disinclined to look back to note unintended consequences.
The Wall Street cowboy does what he does because to his mind it needs doing, silently without apology disappearing into the shadows, not honored, not mythologized, not remembered. This is not the cowboy of the Western legend, but his doppelganger with an opposite bent. He is the cowboy of the last sixty years.
The Western cowboy could not forgive the deceiver, the man willing without much visible struggling with his conscience to build his life into a lie. He would have exposed the hypocrisy of a society that dissembles its motivation in the guise of the law.
What I take from your communiqué is that Ron Pritchard presents the myth (stories) and the truth side by side for the benefit of all participants. He takes the view that participants look at the myth and truth and then decide. You may ask, how can participants once apprised of the truth decide in favor of the myth? Is it not possible to go on believing in a legend that has been exposed as false?
You cannot make people believe in something, even if it is in their own best interests, because the mind of our time is like an invisible hand urging people to walk to the end of the cliff, which they appear to be doing willingly.
You say we have got to crack that nut, but the nut is already cracked. The problem is that the many refuse to believe it so. They have to want what they need. They can be shown the way but they need not follow, especially if cowboys in the tradition of Hollywood myth. In the end, the most powerful force of all is the morality of the times, and that is not a happy dance at the moment.
* * *
WHY DO WE NOT EMBRACE WHAT IS GOOD FOR US?
WHY DO WE NOT EMBRACE WHAT IS GOOD FOR US?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 23, 2010
REFERENCE:
Freud said that we struggle between self-realization and self-defeat. We may blame others for our dark side but the choice is made in the light of day. Smoking is but one of those choices.
There is a long history of smoking tobacco that goes back hundreds of years. In my generation, it was a sign of being grown up for young men. For young women, it was a sign of liberation. My father, a smoker, was aghast to see a woman smoking on the street in the 1940s.
All that changed with WWII, and thereafter, that is, until the last decade or so when the corpses started to pile up like cords of wood, and healthcare insurance costs went through the roof.
For years the American Cancer Society (ACS) stated that smoking was dangerous to our health. Nothing changed.
A decade or so ago, CEOs sat before Congress, all with studies in their hip pockets that confirmed smoking was bad for our health, and lied through their teeth. At the time, there were about 100 million Americans that smoked cigarettes. Today, that number has been reduced to 50 million Americans. What happened?
Many things happened not least of which was the fact that television made dying from smoking public.
The American Medical Association (AMA) and American Cancer Society sponsored research that confirmed the danger, along with a draconian campaign to have Congress pass legislation with a warning on packs of cigarettes, ending television cigarette advertising, and reducing and then essentially eliminating smoking in film and television dramas.
Insurance companies saw soaring medical costs for cigarette smokers. This made it necessary to increase premiums for nonsmokers as well as smokers.
Suddenly, it was no longer cool to be a smoker. The affluent were the first to withdraw from the cancer sticks, and then the middle class reasons of health. Today, the majority of smokers are the poor, the homeless, the working class, the underemployed and the young.
Today, thanks to this AMA/ACS campaign, public places such as shopping malls, restaurants, retail businesses, bars, and corporations have a smoking ban on their premises. Moreover, smoking is not allowed in airport terminals except in cubbyholes away from everyone, and of course, no smoking is allowed on commercial airlines.
Today, 2010, 50 million Americans still smoke and defy the death sentence from the habit, which indicates self-destruction remains a popular choice. This is offered to preface what is to follow.
* * *
AUTHOR WILLIAM L. LIVINGSTON IV WRITES:
Sir James.
We have finally nailed a "universal.” We know what it is and how it behaves. We don't understand why this reaction profile is universal.
The setting:
The audience has a chronic issue with mismatches. Dealing with problems and issues that never get solved. Despair.
The presenters show an actual success model of the same challenge - with the supporting theory. The universal result is that no one in the audience makes a move to understand the success example.
The question for you to answer is why is this result universal?
Here's a ward of sick, dying patients shown a viable cure for what ails them - and they reject it. No comprende.
Thanks
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
We never wander too far from our cage.
You live in a system’s cage with control theory guided by first principles, which apply resolutely and indisputably because they are a function of natural law. Natural law is neither rational nor irrational. It simply is. Defy natural law and entropy accelerates. Death is in the offing. Everything is moving towards entropy but we don’t have to leave our wits in a drawer to have it accelerate, but we do, anyway.
It was the reason I introduced this piece to how the habit of smoking has been derailed if not eliminated by the concerted effort of the AMA/ACS consortium.
* * *
The reaction profile is universal because we are all human, which means we are self-destructive. This cannot be captured in a precise algorithm nor can the trend be reversed with game theory. Science may provide tools for successful modeling and the theory to support it, but neither will change behavior. In the end, it is all about the irrational conundrum of the emotions, which calls for the selling of the idea.
AMA/ACS conducted a surge campaign on cigarette smoking. It had significant impact but fell far short of solving the problem. Next, cigarette packages are to have pictures of horror added to the warnings.
AMA/ACS are selling fear. Thus far fear they have garnered a 50 percent success level as there are still 50 million smokers still smoking and killing themselves. Fear is all about “what, and D4P is all about “why,” which is much more difficult to elicit reaction.
My piece here is not an answer but it might get you thinking in a different way.
* * *
We just had a contentious midterm Congressional election with campaign costs in the neighborhood of $1 billion with politicians dissembling as they crossed their states or communities in an attempt to get elected.
Johnny Carson captured this nonsense in a five-minute video waxing as a politician hooked up to a lie detector machine. The video is hilarious because every time Carson-the-politician makes a statement a foghorn notes the lie with a blast. A retired U.S. Army Colonel, who I emailed this video, responded with this:
“Jim,
“Fun video thanks for sending.
”I think that one of the great frustrations the American people suffer from is the seeming impossibility or arriving at truth where political issues are concerned. I also think that this is to a significant degree a self induced problem in the sense that, while realizing that most political issues are anything but absolute, we refuse to accept the truth that "special interests" are "bad" only when they support what we disagree with.
Ted”
* * *
Colonel Ted has captured the essence of “what.”
* * *
LIFE IN THE COCOON
Few of us wander too far from our cognitive dissonance, the shelter where we turn experience and information around to serve us even when it doesn’t. We cherry pick what we read, see or experience to fit what we think already, magnifying the fact that our thinking is skin deep.
Cognitive dissonance is amenable to information that is consistent with information already there, or what we choose to believe is true. If information cannot pass through our perceptive filter and match our knowledge base, it is rejected, or turned around to mean the opposite of what was intended.
A smoker, I know, points to Aunt Sally who is nearly one hundred and has smoked since she was twelve. This is proof, he says, that the dangers of smoking are poppycock. We both know a man who is fifty, and has smoked unfiltered Camel cigarettes since a teenager. He has had his cancerous cheek and jawbone removed, and is close to losing an eye. He has had to submit to extensive plastic surgery. Yet this smoker refuses to see this has anything to do with smoking.
* * *
Clever people write books with eye-catching titles in an attempt to break through this cognitive dissonance. Take Author Matt Taibbi’s title: “GRIFTOPIA: BUBBLE MACHINES, VAMPIRES SQUIDS, AND THE LONG CON THAT IS BREAKING AMERICA” (2010).
Taibbi implies America’s ruling class is quintessentially a grifter class, or a con artist class obtaining money illicitly. It is a stretch and far from the truth, but it has shock value as an alternative to fear tactics. This author knows the value of shock as entertainment for the frustrated reader who is looking for answers beyond his own conduct. The reader is told “what” is true, but not “why” he should change. It works. It sells books, but it doesn’t change behavior.
* * *
Then there is Umair Haque’s title: “THE NEW CAPITALIST MANIFESTO: Building a Disruptively Better Business” (2010). He paints a bleak picture of Wall Street and corpocracy with a set of “what” measures to rectify the situation, along with a three-tier crisis typology. The author implies we are at Level III and still acting as if at Level I Crisis. So, along with “what” there is a pinch of fear. This, too, changes nothing. Chicken Little has sounded that alarm too many times. As for the East, especially North Korea, it becomes bellicose every time it is disrespected. Only today North Korea bombed a South Korea island. Why is beyond our cognitive dissonance.
* * *
Scores of books feed our anger and angst but mitigate nothing. They are “what” books when our dilemma is “why.” They give us a vocabulary and a narrative to salve our consciences but fail to get inside our behavior. There is no point in painting Wall Street with a broad brush of guilty and Main Street with a broad brush of innocent because they share a common toxic culture. Nothing will change that until the system changes, and we are the system, and we are damaged.
* * *
We live in an age of complexity. Complexity is not synonymous with uncertainty. There are unintended consequences to presidential cautionary interventions and congressional irresponsible dithering with the system. They both can lead to disaster.
We tend to overestimate the likelihood of outcomes we favor, while underestimating the likelihood of outcomes we don’t want. We suffer from unbridled optimism, which seldom has a basis in fact, and are periodically blindsided because of this.
This is not cognitive dissonance. This is optimal bliss. The tobacco company CEOs before Congress lied through their teeth because they wanted to believe this aggravation would blow over. They chose not to believe their own research, and hoped for the best. The BP executives were of a similar mind with the oilrig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010.
* * *
THE AGE OF “WHAT” WITH A NEED FOR AN AGE OF “WHY”
The evidence is palpable, sociological. It defines the times. President Barak Obama is a mirror image of the electorate. People were looking for “The Audacity of Hope” in a time of despair. Hope is passive; courage is active. The expectations of hope in a time of crisis are dashed when the vehicle is optimal bliss for a debtor nation. Now we have “The Mendacity of Hope” (2010) by Obama supporter Roger Hodge, who feels betrayed.
Looking back, it was inevitable he would be elected. Like us, he is not a president who likes to be the bearer of bad news. And like us, he echoes our preference for hyperbole. Unfortunately, hyperbole is a trait ill suited for the times. He entered the White House at a bad time, economically, politically, and militarily, a time when truth telling was in order, and sacrifice should have been on the menu, as it was with FDR. He has suffered the erosion of the public’s trust because he is a “what” president in a time of “why.”
He likes the fame of being president. This is obvious as if the presidency were a televised drama of playacting. A president is on television a good deal, but he seems to enjoy being on center stage more than anyone had estimated.
This is not a play. This is real, and his political instincts appear weak. He surrounded himself with Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner from Wall Street as his economic adviser and secretary of treasury respectively, choosing people who could undo the harm of the mortgage crisis with the very people who had caused the crisis.
African Americans expected he would be a president with the common touch, but he has turned out to be clearly an elitist more comfortable with other elitists than with the general public.
Much attention has been given to his focus on healthcare instead of jobs. The evidence seems to indicate that he believed the stimulus package would correct the jobs problem as it appears he views wealth is created by banks and money firms from the top down, when a capitalistic economy creates jobs by people making things. If people don’t make things, banks and money firms evaporate.
Continuing the “what” of this presidency, he dissociates himself from the business of governance. We saw this when he turned healthcare legislation over to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi showing his distaste for the everyday business of governing.
* * *
WHY A SUCCESSFUL MODEL AND SUPPORTING THEORY FAILS TO TAKE HOLD
It is question of leadership. I will continue on the president as all leaders key off of him.
Obama’s visions appear grand but his explanations prove inadequate. He justified healthcare as a basic right and then said the program would help balance the budget. It is one thing to explain an idea and quite another to float its plausibility.
Millions are unemployed, the war in Afghanistan goes badly, the G-20 Group has ignored most of his recommendations, the Democratic party suffered the loss of the House of Representatives, and seats in the Senate, and yet he claims to have accomplished 70 percent of what he hoped in his first two years. I had people use that kind of math on me when I was an executive so I know the drill. It is cognitive dissonance personified.
The president has come to represent the platonic face of us. He is poetically humble and practically haughty. He is tall, straight, faultless in dress and manner, always smiling but never warm. He talks down to voters while trying to show empathy in town meetings. He has two distinct registers, one talking to clever people like himself, and then talking to the rest of us. To the former he is technocrat, to the latter the regular guy.
From the beginning, there has been a miscalculation. He claims to invite compromise and consensus building while creating polarity. His conciliatory manner of holding himself above politics has somehow generated insurgent movements below politics, and given rise to the Nancy Pelosi theatre.
* * *
WE CANNOT CHANGE OUR STRIPES
A zebra is not a horse. Nor can a zebra change its stripes. We Americans are not Europeans. We are still a work in progress working our way through our chaotic, reactionary, fad driven, superficial, and narcissistic ways. We are a discarding society with a mindset of unlimited resources, and surreal optimism. Despite it all, we always expect to land on our feet.
This is my way of saying we are Obama, and Obama is us. We cannot change our stripes. We must understand him to understand ourselves. There is a mismatch here in understanding, as there is a mismatch with DESIGN FOR PREVENTION. A stretch? I don’t think so.
Throughout our history, we have gotten the presidents we deserve. Each is a calibration of the mind of the times. My reason for this elaborate presentation is based on this thesis.
* * *
Aristocratic FDR had the common touch, guiding us through the Great Depression and WWII. He knew us, and for it was elected four times, dying shortly after being reelected for a fourth term on April 12, 1945. I remember the day because my family was in mourning as if we had lost a blood relative. Providence gave us the president we needed and providence has always done so.
FDR spoke to us not as the elitist from whence he came but from a sense of common man: These are quotations that inspired the nation in its deepest dread:
“There is nothing to fear but fear itself” (First Inaugural Address – call to courage)
* * *
“One thing is sure. We have to do something. We have to do the best we know how at the moment. If it doesn’t turn out right, we can modify it as we go along.” (Call to action: National Recovery Act, setting up the WPA, CCC and other programs during the Great Depression)
* * *
“Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” (Call to war)
* * *
“This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” (WWII generation: call to responsibility)
* * *
“Never have we had so little time to do so much.” (Mobilizing for war in 1942 – call to action now!)
* * *
“We can afford all that we need, but we cannot afford all that we want.” (Policy of rationing WWII – call to sacrifice)
* * *
Now, President Dwight David Eisenhower, in contrast, “the political general with the best press in America,” as Ernie Pyle put it, was president during the booming 1950s and only had to smile a lot, and do nothing, which he did with panache. He was the right president for the times. He and the American psyche had a Janus relationship.
* * *
That is not the case with President Obama, but yet he is a reflection of the American psyche and we of him, which I have attempted to show in this missive. Think of yourself as you read about the president:
(1) Disconnected with the electorate through an inability to relate to, converse with, or identify with its vernacular;
(2) Ignorant of his cognitive dissonance and indifferent to the cognitive dissonance of the American people;
(3) Out of touch with people who work for a living, run a small business, or are struggling to get an education at second and third tier colleges and universities;
(4) Given to saying “I want to make one thing perfectly clear” when what follows is as clear as mud;
(5) Seeks perfection when the American people have no such luxury;
(6) Is committed to his legacy at the expense of his legitimacy;
(7) Surrendered to Republicans at home and to generals abroad in Afghanistan and Iraq;
(8) Has failed to level with the American people that the presidency is a steep learning curve, and therefore has failed to ask for help or sacrifice
(9) Has unwittingly fed the culture wars, political polarity, and gridlock in Congress;
(10) Expects the nation to come to understand his syntax and semantics without him understanding the public’s ability to process information.
* * *
We are a divided people, looking for scapegoats and easy answers when there are none. We must pray President Obama will turn the corner, right the ship, set the keel on course, and all the other clichés because if he doesn’t we will not find our way, as we are connected.
* * *
This is prelude to the “why” that you have asked me to consider. Only today the headlines in the St. Petersburg Times screamed: “UNPREPARED” FOR OIL SPILL: An investigation finds neither BP nor the government had solid data or disaster plans (Front page: November 23, 2010).
DESIGN FOR PREVENTION couldn’t be timelier but I sense that just as President Obama has to make some adjustments so does this book:
(1) D4P lacks intimacy with the reader. Yes, it covers the sins of organization but it doesn’t give the reader a sense that it is speaking to him, directly;
(2) D4P celebrates giants of the evolutionary progression towards testing, detecting, analyzing and resolving systemic perturbations, but again, at the expense of the reader rather than engaging the reader to take action. D4P does little to motivate action;
(3) CEOs should read this, many of whom are engineers, and like engineers in general have a gear head mentality, that is, mechanistic mindset, while these problems are primarily motivational and behavioral and therefore irrational;
(4) D4P has a platform and policy, indeed, a strategic plan for implementation but in a language comfortable to the writer but not necessarily to the reader;
(5) D4P should be required reading for policy makers with an A, B, C format with vivid examples from experience and history;
(6) There is a hyperbole to D4P with an absoluteness, which however true the case may be, turns the reader off, or destroys the rapport and credibility of what is being proffered. It is best to error in understatement;
(7) D4P provides a vocabulary for the engineer or technician on the rig, but more as a statement of purpose rather than as explanation as to how to persuade the boss man to do the right thing;
(8) D4P contains all the information to protect lives, secure operations, and to maximize operational and therefore economic success, but it does so with the emphasis on how to avoid or finesse litigates should things go awry.
(9) D4P has been blessed by this delay and may profit mightily now from it.
* * *
My world is one of OD psychology. I have never been on an oilrig, never dealt with oilrig engineers nor have I had any contact with oil company executives except in relation to oil refineries, and that goes back to my Nalco days as a field chemical engineer.
As I’ve said repeatedly, D4P speaks to me. D4P has pealed back the façade of organizational intransigence to reveal the organization naked and anachronistic. D4P’s boldness in describing institutional infallibility and management authority, as well as the implacable sins of culture persisting in the practice of business as usual despite its incompetence could not be more poignant or relevant to the needs of our times.
The comments above have been made to fill the void of silence that has greeted so many of the copies of D4P I have sent to my readers. I suspect that my comments speak for them, as they have been unwilling or unable to speak for themselves.
In point of fact, then, I think you are correct. We have a problem. AMA/ACS were able to make inroads into cancerous cigarette smoking, but they had unlimited resources. D4P does not. That is the challenge.
This, for whatever value it may have, is offered in friendship.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 23, 2010
REFERENCE:
Freud said that we struggle between self-realization and self-defeat. We may blame others for our dark side but the choice is made in the light of day. Smoking is but one of those choices.
There is a long history of smoking tobacco that goes back hundreds of years. In my generation, it was a sign of being grown up for young men. For young women, it was a sign of liberation. My father, a smoker, was aghast to see a woman smoking on the street in the 1940s.
All that changed with WWII, and thereafter, that is, until the last decade or so when the corpses started to pile up like cords of wood, and healthcare insurance costs went through the roof.
For years the American Cancer Society (ACS) stated that smoking was dangerous to our health. Nothing changed.
A decade or so ago, CEOs sat before Congress, all with studies in their hip pockets that confirmed smoking was bad for our health, and lied through their teeth. At the time, there were about 100 million Americans that smoked cigarettes. Today, that number has been reduced to 50 million Americans. What happened?
Many things happened not least of which was the fact that television made dying from smoking public.
The American Medical Association (AMA) and American Cancer Society sponsored research that confirmed the danger, along with a draconian campaign to have Congress pass legislation with a warning on packs of cigarettes, ending television cigarette advertising, and reducing and then essentially eliminating smoking in film and television dramas.
Insurance companies saw soaring medical costs for cigarette smokers. This made it necessary to increase premiums for nonsmokers as well as smokers.
Suddenly, it was no longer cool to be a smoker. The affluent were the first to withdraw from the cancer sticks, and then the middle class reasons of health. Today, the majority of smokers are the poor, the homeless, the working class, the underemployed and the young.
Today, thanks to this AMA/ACS campaign, public places such as shopping malls, restaurants, retail businesses, bars, and corporations have a smoking ban on their premises. Moreover, smoking is not allowed in airport terminals except in cubbyholes away from everyone, and of course, no smoking is allowed on commercial airlines.
Today, 2010, 50 million Americans still smoke and defy the death sentence from the habit, which indicates self-destruction remains a popular choice. This is offered to preface what is to follow.
* * *
AUTHOR WILLIAM L. LIVINGSTON IV WRITES:
Sir James.
We have finally nailed a "universal.” We know what it is and how it behaves. We don't understand why this reaction profile is universal.
The setting:
The audience has a chronic issue with mismatches. Dealing with problems and issues that never get solved. Despair.
The presenters show an actual success model of the same challenge - with the supporting theory. The universal result is that no one in the audience makes a move to understand the success example.
The question for you to answer is why is this result universal?
Here's a ward of sick, dying patients shown a viable cure for what ails them - and they reject it. No comprende.
Thanks
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
We never wander too far from our cage.
You live in a system’s cage with control theory guided by first principles, which apply resolutely and indisputably because they are a function of natural law. Natural law is neither rational nor irrational. It simply is. Defy natural law and entropy accelerates. Death is in the offing. Everything is moving towards entropy but we don’t have to leave our wits in a drawer to have it accelerate, but we do, anyway.
It was the reason I introduced this piece to how the habit of smoking has been derailed if not eliminated by the concerted effort of the AMA/ACS consortium.
* * *
The reaction profile is universal because we are all human, which means we are self-destructive. This cannot be captured in a precise algorithm nor can the trend be reversed with game theory. Science may provide tools for successful modeling and the theory to support it, but neither will change behavior. In the end, it is all about the irrational conundrum of the emotions, which calls for the selling of the idea.
AMA/ACS conducted a surge campaign on cigarette smoking. It had significant impact but fell far short of solving the problem. Next, cigarette packages are to have pictures of horror added to the warnings.
AMA/ACS are selling fear. Thus far fear they have garnered a 50 percent success level as there are still 50 million smokers still smoking and killing themselves. Fear is all about “what, and D4P is all about “why,” which is much more difficult to elicit reaction.
My piece here is not an answer but it might get you thinking in a different way.
* * *
We just had a contentious midterm Congressional election with campaign costs in the neighborhood of $1 billion with politicians dissembling as they crossed their states or communities in an attempt to get elected.
Johnny Carson captured this nonsense in a five-minute video waxing as a politician hooked up to a lie detector machine. The video is hilarious because every time Carson-the-politician makes a statement a foghorn notes the lie with a blast. A retired U.S. Army Colonel, who I emailed this video, responded with this:
“Jim,
“Fun video thanks for sending.
”I think that one of the great frustrations the American people suffer from is the seeming impossibility or arriving at truth where political issues are concerned. I also think that this is to a significant degree a self induced problem in the sense that, while realizing that most political issues are anything but absolute, we refuse to accept the truth that "special interests" are "bad" only when they support what we disagree with.
Ted”
* * *
Colonel Ted has captured the essence of “what.”
* * *
LIFE IN THE COCOON
Few of us wander too far from our cognitive dissonance, the shelter where we turn experience and information around to serve us even when it doesn’t. We cherry pick what we read, see or experience to fit what we think already, magnifying the fact that our thinking is skin deep.
Cognitive dissonance is amenable to information that is consistent with information already there, or what we choose to believe is true. If information cannot pass through our perceptive filter and match our knowledge base, it is rejected, or turned around to mean the opposite of what was intended.
A smoker, I know, points to Aunt Sally who is nearly one hundred and has smoked since she was twelve. This is proof, he says, that the dangers of smoking are poppycock. We both know a man who is fifty, and has smoked unfiltered Camel cigarettes since a teenager. He has had his cancerous cheek and jawbone removed, and is close to losing an eye. He has had to submit to extensive plastic surgery. Yet this smoker refuses to see this has anything to do with smoking.
* * *
Clever people write books with eye-catching titles in an attempt to break through this cognitive dissonance. Take Author Matt Taibbi’s title: “GRIFTOPIA: BUBBLE MACHINES, VAMPIRES SQUIDS, AND THE LONG CON THAT IS BREAKING AMERICA” (2010).
Taibbi implies America’s ruling class is quintessentially a grifter class, or a con artist class obtaining money illicitly. It is a stretch and far from the truth, but it has shock value as an alternative to fear tactics. This author knows the value of shock as entertainment for the frustrated reader who is looking for answers beyond his own conduct. The reader is told “what” is true, but not “why” he should change. It works. It sells books, but it doesn’t change behavior.
* * *
Then there is Umair Haque’s title: “THE NEW CAPITALIST MANIFESTO: Building a Disruptively Better Business” (2010). He paints a bleak picture of Wall Street and corpocracy with a set of “what” measures to rectify the situation, along with a three-tier crisis typology. The author implies we are at Level III and still acting as if at Level I Crisis. So, along with “what” there is a pinch of fear. This, too, changes nothing. Chicken Little has sounded that alarm too many times. As for the East, especially North Korea, it becomes bellicose every time it is disrespected. Only today North Korea bombed a South Korea island. Why is beyond our cognitive dissonance.
* * *
Scores of books feed our anger and angst but mitigate nothing. They are “what” books when our dilemma is “why.” They give us a vocabulary and a narrative to salve our consciences but fail to get inside our behavior. There is no point in painting Wall Street with a broad brush of guilty and Main Street with a broad brush of innocent because they share a common toxic culture. Nothing will change that until the system changes, and we are the system, and we are damaged.
* * *
We live in an age of complexity. Complexity is not synonymous with uncertainty. There are unintended consequences to presidential cautionary interventions and congressional irresponsible dithering with the system. They both can lead to disaster.
We tend to overestimate the likelihood of outcomes we favor, while underestimating the likelihood of outcomes we don’t want. We suffer from unbridled optimism, which seldom has a basis in fact, and are periodically blindsided because of this.
This is not cognitive dissonance. This is optimal bliss. The tobacco company CEOs before Congress lied through their teeth because they wanted to believe this aggravation would blow over. They chose not to believe their own research, and hoped for the best. The BP executives were of a similar mind with the oilrig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010.
* * *
THE AGE OF “WHAT” WITH A NEED FOR AN AGE OF “WHY”
The evidence is palpable, sociological. It defines the times. President Barak Obama is a mirror image of the electorate. People were looking for “The Audacity of Hope” in a time of despair. Hope is passive; courage is active. The expectations of hope in a time of crisis are dashed when the vehicle is optimal bliss for a debtor nation. Now we have “The Mendacity of Hope” (2010) by Obama supporter Roger Hodge, who feels betrayed.
Looking back, it was inevitable he would be elected. Like us, he is not a president who likes to be the bearer of bad news. And like us, he echoes our preference for hyperbole. Unfortunately, hyperbole is a trait ill suited for the times. He entered the White House at a bad time, economically, politically, and militarily, a time when truth telling was in order, and sacrifice should have been on the menu, as it was with FDR. He has suffered the erosion of the public’s trust because he is a “what” president in a time of “why.”
He likes the fame of being president. This is obvious as if the presidency were a televised drama of playacting. A president is on television a good deal, but he seems to enjoy being on center stage more than anyone had estimated.
This is not a play. This is real, and his political instincts appear weak. He surrounded himself with Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner from Wall Street as his economic adviser and secretary of treasury respectively, choosing people who could undo the harm of the mortgage crisis with the very people who had caused the crisis.
African Americans expected he would be a president with the common touch, but he has turned out to be clearly an elitist more comfortable with other elitists than with the general public.
Much attention has been given to his focus on healthcare instead of jobs. The evidence seems to indicate that he believed the stimulus package would correct the jobs problem as it appears he views wealth is created by banks and money firms from the top down, when a capitalistic economy creates jobs by people making things. If people don’t make things, banks and money firms evaporate.
Continuing the “what” of this presidency, he dissociates himself from the business of governance. We saw this when he turned healthcare legislation over to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi showing his distaste for the everyday business of governing.
* * *
WHY A SUCCESSFUL MODEL AND SUPPORTING THEORY FAILS TO TAKE HOLD
It is question of leadership. I will continue on the president as all leaders key off of him.
Obama’s visions appear grand but his explanations prove inadequate. He justified healthcare as a basic right and then said the program would help balance the budget. It is one thing to explain an idea and quite another to float its plausibility.
Millions are unemployed, the war in Afghanistan goes badly, the G-20 Group has ignored most of his recommendations, the Democratic party suffered the loss of the House of Representatives, and seats in the Senate, and yet he claims to have accomplished 70 percent of what he hoped in his first two years. I had people use that kind of math on me when I was an executive so I know the drill. It is cognitive dissonance personified.
The president has come to represent the platonic face of us. He is poetically humble and practically haughty. He is tall, straight, faultless in dress and manner, always smiling but never warm. He talks down to voters while trying to show empathy in town meetings. He has two distinct registers, one talking to clever people like himself, and then talking to the rest of us. To the former he is technocrat, to the latter the regular guy.
From the beginning, there has been a miscalculation. He claims to invite compromise and consensus building while creating polarity. His conciliatory manner of holding himself above politics has somehow generated insurgent movements below politics, and given rise to the Nancy Pelosi theatre.
* * *
WE CANNOT CHANGE OUR STRIPES
A zebra is not a horse. Nor can a zebra change its stripes. We Americans are not Europeans. We are still a work in progress working our way through our chaotic, reactionary, fad driven, superficial, and narcissistic ways. We are a discarding society with a mindset of unlimited resources, and surreal optimism. Despite it all, we always expect to land on our feet.
This is my way of saying we are Obama, and Obama is us. We cannot change our stripes. We must understand him to understand ourselves. There is a mismatch here in understanding, as there is a mismatch with DESIGN FOR PREVENTION. A stretch? I don’t think so.
Throughout our history, we have gotten the presidents we deserve. Each is a calibration of the mind of the times. My reason for this elaborate presentation is based on this thesis.
* * *
Aristocratic FDR had the common touch, guiding us through the Great Depression and WWII. He knew us, and for it was elected four times, dying shortly after being reelected for a fourth term on April 12, 1945. I remember the day because my family was in mourning as if we had lost a blood relative. Providence gave us the president we needed and providence has always done so.
FDR spoke to us not as the elitist from whence he came but from a sense of common man: These are quotations that inspired the nation in its deepest dread:
“There is nothing to fear but fear itself” (First Inaugural Address – call to courage)
* * *
“One thing is sure. We have to do something. We have to do the best we know how at the moment. If it doesn’t turn out right, we can modify it as we go along.” (Call to action: National Recovery Act, setting up the WPA, CCC and other programs during the Great Depression)
* * *
“Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” (Call to war)
* * *
“This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” (WWII generation: call to responsibility)
* * *
“Never have we had so little time to do so much.” (Mobilizing for war in 1942 – call to action now!)
* * *
“We can afford all that we need, but we cannot afford all that we want.” (Policy of rationing WWII – call to sacrifice)
* * *
Now, President Dwight David Eisenhower, in contrast, “the political general with the best press in America,” as Ernie Pyle put it, was president during the booming 1950s and only had to smile a lot, and do nothing, which he did with panache. He was the right president for the times. He and the American psyche had a Janus relationship.
* * *
That is not the case with President Obama, but yet he is a reflection of the American psyche and we of him, which I have attempted to show in this missive. Think of yourself as you read about the president:
(1) Disconnected with the electorate through an inability to relate to, converse with, or identify with its vernacular;
(2) Ignorant of his cognitive dissonance and indifferent to the cognitive dissonance of the American people;
(3) Out of touch with people who work for a living, run a small business, or are struggling to get an education at second and third tier colleges and universities;
(4) Given to saying “I want to make one thing perfectly clear” when what follows is as clear as mud;
(5) Seeks perfection when the American people have no such luxury;
(6) Is committed to his legacy at the expense of his legitimacy;
(7) Surrendered to Republicans at home and to generals abroad in Afghanistan and Iraq;
(8) Has failed to level with the American people that the presidency is a steep learning curve, and therefore has failed to ask for help or sacrifice
(9) Has unwittingly fed the culture wars, political polarity, and gridlock in Congress;
(10) Expects the nation to come to understand his syntax and semantics without him understanding the public’s ability to process information.
* * *
We are a divided people, looking for scapegoats and easy answers when there are none. We must pray President Obama will turn the corner, right the ship, set the keel on course, and all the other clichés because if he doesn’t we will not find our way, as we are connected.
* * *
This is prelude to the “why” that you have asked me to consider. Only today the headlines in the St. Petersburg Times screamed: “UNPREPARED” FOR OIL SPILL: An investigation finds neither BP nor the government had solid data or disaster plans (Front page: November 23, 2010).
DESIGN FOR PREVENTION couldn’t be timelier but I sense that just as President Obama has to make some adjustments so does this book:
(1) D4P lacks intimacy with the reader. Yes, it covers the sins of organization but it doesn’t give the reader a sense that it is speaking to him, directly;
(2) D4P celebrates giants of the evolutionary progression towards testing, detecting, analyzing and resolving systemic perturbations, but again, at the expense of the reader rather than engaging the reader to take action. D4P does little to motivate action;
(3) CEOs should read this, many of whom are engineers, and like engineers in general have a gear head mentality, that is, mechanistic mindset, while these problems are primarily motivational and behavioral and therefore irrational;
(4) D4P has a platform and policy, indeed, a strategic plan for implementation but in a language comfortable to the writer but not necessarily to the reader;
(5) D4P should be required reading for policy makers with an A, B, C format with vivid examples from experience and history;
(6) There is a hyperbole to D4P with an absoluteness, which however true the case may be, turns the reader off, or destroys the rapport and credibility of what is being proffered. It is best to error in understatement;
(7) D4P provides a vocabulary for the engineer or technician on the rig, but more as a statement of purpose rather than as explanation as to how to persuade the boss man to do the right thing;
(8) D4P contains all the information to protect lives, secure operations, and to maximize operational and therefore economic success, but it does so with the emphasis on how to avoid or finesse litigates should things go awry.
(9) D4P has been blessed by this delay and may profit mightily now from it.
* * *
My world is one of OD psychology. I have never been on an oilrig, never dealt with oilrig engineers nor have I had any contact with oil company executives except in relation to oil refineries, and that goes back to my Nalco days as a field chemical engineer.
As I’ve said repeatedly, D4P speaks to me. D4P has pealed back the façade of organizational intransigence to reveal the organization naked and anachronistic. D4P’s boldness in describing institutional infallibility and management authority, as well as the implacable sins of culture persisting in the practice of business as usual despite its incompetence could not be more poignant or relevant to the needs of our times.
The comments above have been made to fill the void of silence that has greeted so many of the copies of D4P I have sent to my readers. I suspect that my comments speak for them, as they have been unwilling or unable to speak for themselves.
In point of fact, then, I think you are correct. We have a problem. AMA/ACS were able to make inroads into cancerous cigarette smoking, but they had unlimited resources. D4P does not. That is the challenge.
This, for whatever value it may have, is offered in friendship.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
OUGHT-TO-BE -- A WORLD I ENVISION!
OUGHT-TO-BE – A WORLD I ENVISION!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 23, 2010
* * *
Reference:
A reader here is responding to my missive, “losers Become Winners Because They Never Quit” (November 22, 2010).
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Jim,
What does your ‘ought to be’ world look like?
Eric,
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
It is a good question of which I have written volumes.***
When I'm gone I hope someone will ferret out this idealized "ought-to-be" world I envision. It is worthy of a missive, which I just might do.
* * *
The short answer is a world that treats others as good and not any more badly than it has treated me.
Where balance is the driving force to individualism, community and society.
Where love is the dominant virtue with compassion not pity.
Where life has consequences for everyone rich and poor, good and bad, liked and disliked. No one has a free pass or a free lunch.
Where everyone has an opportunity to fail so that they might find their way to success. And success is not defined by brilliance, personal stature, or acclaim, but by finding a suitable match between interests, ability and opportunity.
Where the idea of philanthropy is committed to history. It is one of the most bizarre and mendacious of enterprises in expiating guilt for riding herd over some and throwing others under the bridge on the way to affluence.
Where elitism dies a natural death.
Where religion dissolves into a common tolerance and understanding of personal choice, and where there is no proselytizing of any faith, and where atheists and agnostics are treated with as much respect as any other philosophy of existence.
Where science quits flexing its muscles and realizing the consequences of its hubris.
Where freedom is largely negative freedom and not the cage of positive freedom that we have come to call home.
Where ambition and pushing the envelope can be toxic if not contained within reason. Moderation in all things, which has been blatantly ignored, could restore the planet to its health, and us to a more sensible and less excessive lifestyle.
Where we look for direction within ourselves and therefore are more prone to please ourselves than to be obsessed with pleasing others.
Where we look inside the idea of self-sacrifice for who is asking it and why.
Where self-control is the barometer to all control at every level and circumstance. We are a physical system with autonomous controls that is incredibly resilient. Our environment is more fragile. This places the onus on us to recognize the distinction.
Where a moral compass, which has been badly damaged to being dysfunctional, is restored to our soul. In the last one hundred years, we have lost our way creating an insatiable appetite for want at the expense of need. This has driven the planet to being on life supports, and us with it.
Where we are judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin, or whether we are tall or short, fat or slim, handsome or plain, smart or dumb, well bred or not, successful or not.
Where we finally admit the power of fear and paranoia to control our lives and dispatch our wills into hiding. We are all insecure, all connected to this fabric of insecurity, and therefore have no choice but to appreciate the wisdom of insecurity.
Where entertainment is self-generated and there are no such fabricated institutions that promote the idea of celebrity.
Where every man woman and child in the world has clothes on their back, a roof over their head, food on the table, access to fresh drinking water and adequate sanitation, an opportunity to do meaningful work, love and affection of family, with the spiritual substance to keep body and soul in health in a climate of happiness without any fear of a police or military invasion in the night.
* * *
***THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN (1995), THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996), SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998), CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERS AND DISSONANT WORKERS (2000), IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (2003), and A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007) cover this same turf in some detail.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 23, 2010
* * *
Reference:
A reader here is responding to my missive, “losers Become Winners Because They Never Quit” (November 22, 2010).
* * *
A READER WRITES:
Jim,
What does your ‘ought to be’ world look like?
Eric,
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
It is a good question of which I have written volumes.***
When I'm gone I hope someone will ferret out this idealized "ought-to-be" world I envision. It is worthy of a missive, which I just might do.
* * *
The short answer is a world that treats others as good and not any more badly than it has treated me.
Where balance is the driving force to individualism, community and society.
Where love is the dominant virtue with compassion not pity.
Where life has consequences for everyone rich and poor, good and bad, liked and disliked. No one has a free pass or a free lunch.
Where everyone has an opportunity to fail so that they might find their way to success. And success is not defined by brilliance, personal stature, or acclaim, but by finding a suitable match between interests, ability and opportunity.
Where the idea of philanthropy is committed to history. It is one of the most bizarre and mendacious of enterprises in expiating guilt for riding herd over some and throwing others under the bridge on the way to affluence.
Where elitism dies a natural death.
Where religion dissolves into a common tolerance and understanding of personal choice, and where there is no proselytizing of any faith, and where atheists and agnostics are treated with as much respect as any other philosophy of existence.
Where science quits flexing its muscles and realizing the consequences of its hubris.
Where freedom is largely negative freedom and not the cage of positive freedom that we have come to call home.
Where ambition and pushing the envelope can be toxic if not contained within reason. Moderation in all things, which has been blatantly ignored, could restore the planet to its health, and us to a more sensible and less excessive lifestyle.
Where we look for direction within ourselves and therefore are more prone to please ourselves than to be obsessed with pleasing others.
Where we look inside the idea of self-sacrifice for who is asking it and why.
Where self-control is the barometer to all control at every level and circumstance. We are a physical system with autonomous controls that is incredibly resilient. Our environment is more fragile. This places the onus on us to recognize the distinction.
Where a moral compass, which has been badly damaged to being dysfunctional, is restored to our soul. In the last one hundred years, we have lost our way creating an insatiable appetite for want at the expense of need. This has driven the planet to being on life supports, and us with it.
Where we are judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin, or whether we are tall or short, fat or slim, handsome or plain, smart or dumb, well bred or not, successful or not.
Where we finally admit the power of fear and paranoia to control our lives and dispatch our wills into hiding. We are all insecure, all connected to this fabric of insecurity, and therefore have no choice but to appreciate the wisdom of insecurity.
Where entertainment is self-generated and there are no such fabricated institutions that promote the idea of celebrity.
Where every man woman and child in the world has clothes on their back, a roof over their head, food on the table, access to fresh drinking water and adequate sanitation, an opportunity to do meaningful work, love and affection of family, with the spiritual substance to keep body and soul in health in a climate of happiness without any fear of a police or military invasion in the night.
* * *
***THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN (1995), THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996), SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998), CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERS AND DISSONANT WORKERS (2000), IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE: MEMOIR OF THE 1940s WRITTEN AS A NOVEL (2003), and A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007) cover this same turf in some detail.
Be always well,
Jim
Monday, November 22, 2010
LOSERS BECOME WINNERS BECAUSE THEY NEVER QUIT!
LOSERS BECOME WINNERS BECAUSE THEY NEVER QUIT!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 22, 2010
* * *
In “Self-Reliance” (1841) Emerson insisted that society’s views of failure and success were skewed. “If our young men miscarry in their first enterprise,” he wrote, “ they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined."
Today, college graduates are considered a failure if they are not connected in their chosen profession within a year.
Emerson argued, the flexible person who “in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles it, keeps a school, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls.”
He was making allowances for his friend, Henry David Thoreau, who seemed to fail at everything, and so he bankrolled him, let him set out on his land, and contemplate nature, which produced WALDEN (1854), and would make him immortal.
Thoreau says in "Walden" he tried trade (father's pencil business) but "found that it would take ten years to get underway in that, and that then it should probably be on my way to the devil." He was convinced that "the way you get money almost without exception led downward. He abandoned business and pursued art, using other people's money (Emerson's) to pave his way.
* * *
In describing Thoreau's lackadaisical waywardness, Emerson could just as easily have been describing John Brown's. In 1859, he would attack Harper’s Ferry with an impossible plan to liberate blacks while killing many whites with the aim to start a revolution, only to fail and to be hanged.
“Self-Reliance” was written sixteen years before Emerson met John Brown, but the abolitionist lived it to the letter.
* * *
There were cells of abolitionists across the United States, but they were essentially pacifists who hoped that slavery would eventually end through non-violence. Not John Brown. For his bloody scourge at Pottawatomie and Harper’s Ferry, where white slaveholders were cut down mercilessly, with Brown and the freed slaves fleeing to the mountains, he would become a legend. Songs and books would be written about him. Emerson even saw him as Christ-like.
* * *
Abraham Lincoln spent a good part of his early life as the failure Emerson described. But whereas Brown was a man of action, Lincoln was essentially a prudent man of reflection. He was never an abolitionist, but read of the exploits of Brown and not unkindly. David S. Reynolds writes in “John Brown: Abolitionist” (2005):
“Though John Brown did not live to see the Civil War, he embodied its spirit in advance. What Abraham Lincoln became by the end of the conflict – an antislavery warrior who resorted to extreme violence and who humbled himself before what he called ‘the providence of God’ and ‘the judgment of the Lord -- is a heightened version of what John Brown, the God directed fighter against slavery, had been when he died on the scaffold six years earlier.”
* * *
Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1852). The story, she acknowledged, was inspired by the memoirs of Reverend Josiah Henson.
Henson, a Negro and abolitionist, was recognized for his work in the Underground Railroad from his home in Canada. His courageous struggle for freedom, and to free others was captured in his memoirs.
It was quite a find for Stowe, as she wasn't taken seriously as a writer. "Uncle Tom" is modeled after Reverend Henson. More than one hundred and fifty years later, children of all ages read this book. It captured the mind of the time.
Harriet Beecher was one of thirteen siblings of the famous abolitionist preacher Lyman Beecher, and sister of Henry Ward Beecher who was equally famous as a preacher and the accused in the adultery trial of 1875, which some called the "scandal of the century."
* * *
Mark Twain is considered to be our greatest American writer. He wrote many books, but one great book, “Huckleberry Finn” (1885). It is great because it is well written, bold, and confidently written in the vernacular. Again, it was a reflection of the mind of the times.
* * *
Like John Brown, Henry David Thoreau, and Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain evolved. He encountered more than his share of failures or miscalculations along the way.
Twain was something of a gambler and speculator. He managed to invest in schemes going nowhere, while failing to see the possibilities of Alexander Graham Bell and his telephone, passing up that opportunity. He did publish the autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant, which I suspect he edited, as it is considered the greatest biography of any president.
* * *
WHAT DO THESE LOSERS AS WINNERS HAVE IN COMMON?
They were mainly unconscious of being special, or gifted or in anyway extraordinary. Rage, often like a slowly gathering storm, welled up in them before it cascaded into any kind of expression or action. They were incubators that were in the world but separate from it. By that I mean they successfully avoided getting caught up and trapped in the prevailing nonsense.
* * *
Ralph Waldo Emerson was not of this crowd. He was a poetic and philosophical OD psychologist one hundred seventy five years early.
Emerson observed, reflected on his observations, processed them in terms of his mental powers, and then laid out his assessment “as observations,” being careful to maintain a certain unobtrusive sobriety. He was just provocative enough to be in demand as a speaker and writer.
Emerson could see American society was moving from an agrarian to an industrial society, and he wasn’t happy about it. He could see society going from a subsistence to a capitalistic economy, from the handyman to the specialist. He wrote:
“Functions are parceled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, while each other performs his. This reduces man to a thing, into many things. The food gathering man on the farm becomes the mere farmer, the businessman a moneymaker, the attorney a statute book, the mechanic, a machine, Man Thinking the bookworm, and so forth.”
Emerson was describing most everyone, but not these winners who were often losers, while resisting becoming machines.
Certain individuals take the opportunity of society in transition to make their mark in their own inimitable way, and for that we read about them and celebrate them, but not always in their lifetime.
* * *
These losers as winners were conscious or unconscious outsiders with a rage or passion to right wrongs that they could not stomach.
For John Brown and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Abraham Lincoln it was slavery. For Mark Twain it was the chaos, corruption and dysfunction of "The Gilded Age."
Twain was forced to go on the road in his white suit with his gift of sarcasm and humor to delight audiences because he couldn’t pay the bills back home with his writing.
One hundred years later, Hal Holbrook revised his career by training to emulate and imitate the Hannibal, Missouri native on stage to approving audiences across the continent.
The first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography is now on sale, one hundred years after his death. I suspect that people are not going to be too please with how closely he resembles my characterization of losers as winners. We like to romanticize our heroes into stick figures.
* * *
Winners who were once losers are always individuals. They manage to touch a cord in the heart of everyman by their ability to break free.
Already in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, factories were replacing guilds, machines were replacing manpower, corporations were replacing family businesses, commercial farms were replacing family farms and other appurtenances of capitalism were ushering in the age of depersonalization, the age that has steamrolled into our times.
* * *
OD psychologist Emerson could see this. He blamed it on Christianity, mainly Calvinism, and organized what would come to be called “transcendentalism,” which was a hybrid of Christianity and Eastern religions. It never took.
* * *
Losers that become winners do not have the temperament much less the patience to compare and compete with others. The reader may use the sports analogy to show that competition in sports makes winners. Competition in sports makes a bland confection in which perfection of a type is realized but not something of lasting quality. Never.
Competition has made society so bland, so common that everyone looks and acts and thinks like everyone else, that is, except losers who become winners.
* * *
There are many other attributes of losers who become winners but the most important is that losing is never a “stop sign.” It is a pause to redirect, reinvent, or revise the plan.
* * *
WHY DO WE NOT EMBRACE WHAT IS GOOD FOR US?
Losers who become winners have no problem with this question because “good” and “bad” are not relevant to their motivation. I have written a long piece on this subject, which is covered in another missive.
OD psychologist Emerson, I suspect, would gladly return to his grave once exposed to our times.
He would see the pervasive mediocrity in virtually every aspect of society and would doubtlessly wonder how everything went so wrong.
In his most nightmarish reflections, it would be impossible for him to believe:
(1) That commercial television represents entertainment,
(2) That more than 95 percent of working people are wage slaves, and act as if they are satisfied with their lot,
(3) That everyone is talking into some handheld device or pounding on another one impervious to their surroundings,
(4) That the “seven deadly sins” have reached capitalistic splendor as wealth creators,
(5) That religious zeal, which he thought was insane in his time, has become a patricide phenomenon,
(6) That what masquerades as art in music, literature, painting, architectures and philosophy has taken on a blandness that doesn’t reach above the gonads, and
(7) That science, which he thought was the rational answer in the Age of Enlightenment, contains the spark of mankind’s total destruction.
* * *
Alas, we don’t have a poet, philosopher OD psychologist like Emerson, and suffer mightily for the absence.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 22, 2010
* * *
In “Self-Reliance” (1841) Emerson insisted that society’s views of failure and success were skewed. “If our young men miscarry in their first enterprise,” he wrote, “ they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined."
Today, college graduates are considered a failure if they are not connected in their chosen profession within a year.
Emerson argued, the flexible person who “in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles it, keeps a school, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls.”
He was making allowances for his friend, Henry David Thoreau, who seemed to fail at everything, and so he bankrolled him, let him set out on his land, and contemplate nature, which produced WALDEN (1854), and would make him immortal.
Thoreau says in "Walden" he tried trade (father's pencil business) but "found that it would take ten years to get underway in that, and that then it should probably be on my way to the devil." He was convinced that "the way you get money almost without exception led downward. He abandoned business and pursued art, using other people's money (Emerson's) to pave his way.
* * *
In describing Thoreau's lackadaisical waywardness, Emerson could just as easily have been describing John Brown's. In 1859, he would attack Harper’s Ferry with an impossible plan to liberate blacks while killing many whites with the aim to start a revolution, only to fail and to be hanged.
“Self-Reliance” was written sixteen years before Emerson met John Brown, but the abolitionist lived it to the letter.
* * *
There were cells of abolitionists across the United States, but they were essentially pacifists who hoped that slavery would eventually end through non-violence. Not John Brown. For his bloody scourge at Pottawatomie and Harper’s Ferry, where white slaveholders were cut down mercilessly, with Brown and the freed slaves fleeing to the mountains, he would become a legend. Songs and books would be written about him. Emerson even saw him as Christ-like.
* * *
Abraham Lincoln spent a good part of his early life as the failure Emerson described. But whereas Brown was a man of action, Lincoln was essentially a prudent man of reflection. He was never an abolitionist, but read of the exploits of Brown and not unkindly. David S. Reynolds writes in “John Brown: Abolitionist” (2005):
“Though John Brown did not live to see the Civil War, he embodied its spirit in advance. What Abraham Lincoln became by the end of the conflict – an antislavery warrior who resorted to extreme violence and who humbled himself before what he called ‘the providence of God’ and ‘the judgment of the Lord -- is a heightened version of what John Brown, the God directed fighter against slavery, had been when he died on the scaffold six years earlier.”
* * *
Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1852). The story, she acknowledged, was inspired by the memoirs of Reverend Josiah Henson.
Henson, a Negro and abolitionist, was recognized for his work in the Underground Railroad from his home in Canada. His courageous struggle for freedom, and to free others was captured in his memoirs.
It was quite a find for Stowe, as she wasn't taken seriously as a writer. "Uncle Tom" is modeled after Reverend Henson. More than one hundred and fifty years later, children of all ages read this book. It captured the mind of the time.
Harriet Beecher was one of thirteen siblings of the famous abolitionist preacher Lyman Beecher, and sister of Henry Ward Beecher who was equally famous as a preacher and the accused in the adultery trial of 1875, which some called the "scandal of the century."
* * *
Mark Twain is considered to be our greatest American writer. He wrote many books, but one great book, “Huckleberry Finn” (1885). It is great because it is well written, bold, and confidently written in the vernacular. Again, it was a reflection of the mind of the times.
* * *
Like John Brown, Henry David Thoreau, and Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain evolved. He encountered more than his share of failures or miscalculations along the way.
Twain was something of a gambler and speculator. He managed to invest in schemes going nowhere, while failing to see the possibilities of Alexander Graham Bell and his telephone, passing up that opportunity. He did publish the autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant, which I suspect he edited, as it is considered the greatest biography of any president.
* * *
WHAT DO THESE LOSERS AS WINNERS HAVE IN COMMON?
They were mainly unconscious of being special, or gifted or in anyway extraordinary. Rage, often like a slowly gathering storm, welled up in them before it cascaded into any kind of expression or action. They were incubators that were in the world but separate from it. By that I mean they successfully avoided getting caught up and trapped in the prevailing nonsense.
* * *
Ralph Waldo Emerson was not of this crowd. He was a poetic and philosophical OD psychologist one hundred seventy five years early.
Emerson observed, reflected on his observations, processed them in terms of his mental powers, and then laid out his assessment “as observations,” being careful to maintain a certain unobtrusive sobriety. He was just provocative enough to be in demand as a speaker and writer.
Emerson could see American society was moving from an agrarian to an industrial society, and he wasn’t happy about it. He could see society going from a subsistence to a capitalistic economy, from the handyman to the specialist. He wrote:
“Functions are parceled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, while each other performs his. This reduces man to a thing, into many things. The food gathering man on the farm becomes the mere farmer, the businessman a moneymaker, the attorney a statute book, the mechanic, a machine, Man Thinking the bookworm, and so forth.”
Emerson was describing most everyone, but not these winners who were often losers, while resisting becoming machines.
Certain individuals take the opportunity of society in transition to make their mark in their own inimitable way, and for that we read about them and celebrate them, but not always in their lifetime.
* * *
These losers as winners were conscious or unconscious outsiders with a rage or passion to right wrongs that they could not stomach.
For John Brown and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Abraham Lincoln it was slavery. For Mark Twain it was the chaos, corruption and dysfunction of "The Gilded Age."
Twain was forced to go on the road in his white suit with his gift of sarcasm and humor to delight audiences because he couldn’t pay the bills back home with his writing.
One hundred years later, Hal Holbrook revised his career by training to emulate and imitate the Hannibal, Missouri native on stage to approving audiences across the continent.
The first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography is now on sale, one hundred years after his death. I suspect that people are not going to be too please with how closely he resembles my characterization of losers as winners. We like to romanticize our heroes into stick figures.
* * *
Winners who were once losers are always individuals. They manage to touch a cord in the heart of everyman by their ability to break free.
Already in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, factories were replacing guilds, machines were replacing manpower, corporations were replacing family businesses, commercial farms were replacing family farms and other appurtenances of capitalism were ushering in the age of depersonalization, the age that has steamrolled into our times.
* * *
OD psychologist Emerson could see this. He blamed it on Christianity, mainly Calvinism, and organized what would come to be called “transcendentalism,” which was a hybrid of Christianity and Eastern religions. It never took.
* * *
Losers that become winners do not have the temperament much less the patience to compare and compete with others. The reader may use the sports analogy to show that competition in sports makes winners. Competition in sports makes a bland confection in which perfection of a type is realized but not something of lasting quality. Never.
Competition has made society so bland, so common that everyone looks and acts and thinks like everyone else, that is, except losers who become winners.
* * *
There are many other attributes of losers who become winners but the most important is that losing is never a “stop sign.” It is a pause to redirect, reinvent, or revise the plan.
* * *
WHY DO WE NOT EMBRACE WHAT IS GOOD FOR US?
Losers who become winners have no problem with this question because “good” and “bad” are not relevant to their motivation. I have written a long piece on this subject, which is covered in another missive.
OD psychologist Emerson, I suspect, would gladly return to his grave once exposed to our times.
He would see the pervasive mediocrity in virtually every aspect of society and would doubtlessly wonder how everything went so wrong.
In his most nightmarish reflections, it would be impossible for him to believe:
(1) That commercial television represents entertainment,
(2) That more than 95 percent of working people are wage slaves, and act as if they are satisfied with their lot,
(3) That everyone is talking into some handheld device or pounding on another one impervious to their surroundings,
(4) That the “seven deadly sins” have reached capitalistic splendor as wealth creators,
(5) That religious zeal, which he thought was insane in his time, has become a patricide phenomenon,
(6) That what masquerades as art in music, literature, painting, architectures and philosophy has taken on a blandness that doesn’t reach above the gonads, and
(7) That science, which he thought was the rational answer in the Age of Enlightenment, contains the spark of mankind’s total destruction.
* * *
Alas, we don’t have a poet, philosopher OD psychologist like Emerson, and suffer mightily for the absence.
* * *
Friday, November 19, 2010
THE HIGHEST FORM OF FLATTERY
THE HIGHEST FORM OF FLATTERY
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 19, 2010
* * *
Someone wrote and asked if I was acquainted with Dr. Michael Beer of Harvard Business School. I replied in an email that, “No, I had never met him but knew someone who had once worked with him, and it didn’t work out too well.”
The writer emailed me back immediately, “That’s interesting. It appears Dr. Beer has lifted your SIX SILENT KILLERS for his purposes, including a video on them, but he calls them ‘six barriers to performance.’ What do you think of that?”
I replied, “I don’t think anything. I don’t know the man, don’t plan on contacting the man, and if he has to steal from me of all people, welcome to the cue.”
* * *
Some of my readers are writers. I suspect that they have had material lifted as well. Every once in a while someone brings this lifting to my attention. In fact, I broke contact with a national periodical that had published a piece of mine that I had not authorized. That ended that connection.
Over the last forty years, my schematics have been lifted, and sometimes credited, and sometimes not. I am a visual writer and find schematics help to clarify what I am trying to communicate.
I am also a conceptual writer, meaning I construct buildings of thought (e.g. The Fisher Paradigm) that readers can then identify and use in their lives.
An author asked permission to publish one of my concepts, my mentoring paradigm, promising once the book was published to send me a copy. I am still waiting for the book, which was published several years ago. The irony is that the author and the book in question are featured on pages of www.google.com devoted to my works. Other authors piggyback on those pages as well.
* * *
It is hard for BB to understand my motivation in publishing these missives when Ben Johnson said only a fool writes for pleasure and not for coin. However, I have good company. It was Melville who said, “It is now my settled purpose to write novels that are said to fail.” He knew MOBY DICK was too philosophical with a depth and style that would not appeal to conventional critics or a public that feasted on sentimental fiction and pulp romances, yet he could not stop himself from writing such challenging prose.
Emily Dickinson, who went virtually unpublished in her lifetime, and who now qualifies as the greatest poet who ever failed, was considered a closet eccentric.
Another proud failure was Walt Whitman, whose magnificent 1855 edition of LEAVES OF GRASS met with wide spread vilification from critics as being a mass of bombast, egotism, vulgarity and nonsense.
All three of these writers are now considered geniuses of American literature.
* * *
Incidentally, this is not an invitation to send me references to my works being plagiarized. I am flattered that people feel I have something useful to say. I am too old to suffer umbrage.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 19, 2010
* * *
Someone wrote and asked if I was acquainted with Dr. Michael Beer of Harvard Business School. I replied in an email that, “No, I had never met him but knew someone who had once worked with him, and it didn’t work out too well.”
The writer emailed me back immediately, “That’s interesting. It appears Dr. Beer has lifted your SIX SILENT KILLERS for his purposes, including a video on them, but he calls them ‘six barriers to performance.’ What do you think of that?”
I replied, “I don’t think anything. I don’t know the man, don’t plan on contacting the man, and if he has to steal from me of all people, welcome to the cue.”
* * *
Some of my readers are writers. I suspect that they have had material lifted as well. Every once in a while someone brings this lifting to my attention. In fact, I broke contact with a national periodical that had published a piece of mine that I had not authorized. That ended that connection.
Over the last forty years, my schematics have been lifted, and sometimes credited, and sometimes not. I am a visual writer and find schematics help to clarify what I am trying to communicate.
I am also a conceptual writer, meaning I construct buildings of thought (e.g. The Fisher Paradigm) that readers can then identify and use in their lives.
An author asked permission to publish one of my concepts, my mentoring paradigm, promising once the book was published to send me a copy. I am still waiting for the book, which was published several years ago. The irony is that the author and the book in question are featured on pages of www.google.com devoted to my works. Other authors piggyback on those pages as well.
* * *
It is hard for BB to understand my motivation in publishing these missives when Ben Johnson said only a fool writes for pleasure and not for coin. However, I have good company. It was Melville who said, “It is now my settled purpose to write novels that are said to fail.” He knew MOBY DICK was too philosophical with a depth and style that would not appeal to conventional critics or a public that feasted on sentimental fiction and pulp romances, yet he could not stop himself from writing such challenging prose.
Emily Dickinson, who went virtually unpublished in her lifetime, and who now qualifies as the greatest poet who ever failed, was considered a closet eccentric.
Another proud failure was Walt Whitman, whose magnificent 1855 edition of LEAVES OF GRASS met with wide spread vilification from critics as being a mass of bombast, egotism, vulgarity and nonsense.
All three of these writers are now considered geniuses of American literature.
* * *
Incidentally, this is not an invitation to send me references to my works being plagiarized. I am flattered that people feel I have something useful to say. I am too old to suffer umbrage.
* * *
THE EROSION OF TRUST STALLS THE ECONOMIC ENGINE OF AMERICAN SOCIETY
THE EROSION OF TRUST STALLS THE ECONOMIC ENGINE OF AMERICAN SOCIETY
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 18, 2010
* * *
REFERENCE:
As with all my missives, I attempt to put a human face on my wonderings. My interest is more in the "why" (i.e., the human cause) and less with the "what" (i.e., the mechanics of the paralysis) of our economic decline.
My sense is that a period of exponential boom (1950 – 1980) was followed by a period of existential bust (1980 – 2010). People in the know, who are in the business of tracking such things, confirm my premise.
We are what we think, and what we think we don’t always know, and worse yet, as I will show here, those who we think know, don’t as well, and so the blind lead the blind sometimes knowingly and sometimes not into distrust, corruption, incompetence, and greed.
It all starts with ordinary people who suspend self-responsibility, which allow them to be taken in with something that is too good to be true, but never is. Trust is always at issue.
* * *
PRESIDENT OBAMA’S DEFICIT REDUCTION COMMISSION
Former Wyoming US Senator Alan Simpson (1979 – 1997) on PBSTV with Charlie Rose (Wednesday, November 17, 2010) said that for the last seventy-five years, or since the mid-1930s, people have been sent to Washington, DC to “bring home the bacon.”
People would say, “You haven’t helped us get a new dam or new visiting center.” Simpson said he would reply, “You have a dam and a visiting center. I won’t sign on for this.” They would reply, “What kind of a senator are you?”
He would be meeting citizens in a town hall, and they would say, “We need this or that.” A colleague would say to a staffer, “Write that down.” It would become an earmark like the bridge in Alaska that goes nowhere.
Greed is not new. Nor is it confined to Wall Street.
Simpson along with Erskine Bowles, former chief of staff in President Clinton’s Administration, heads President Obama's “Deficit Reduction Commission.” It is a committee of eighteen members with fourteen members having to agree on the proposal before it can be sent to Congress for consideration. The members of the commission are equally divided between Democrats and Republicans.
The aim of the commission is to take $4 trillion out of the budget in ten years. This means looking at Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Department of Defense budget, income tax deductions, and several other entitlements and tax saving opportunities.
Simpson and Bowles have been meeting since January with this commission attempting to find a common ground. Simpson confessed, “It took months since January to establish trust. This town (Washington, DC) is devoid of trust. It took us literally three to four months to trust each other.” How did they do it?
Nobody left the room. It took a long time for everyone to get passed stereotypes and personal and political biases.
* * *
THE DRONE BRIGADE
We have gotten used to economic “experts” talking too fast beginning sentences by holding out their hands pointing on fingers problems from the national debt to global warming, from tax codes to fiscal insolvency. We take their glibness for intelligence and competence. Over the past thirty years, we have relied on such people not only to know what they are talking about, but also to be sincerely thinking in terms of our best interests.
We have become enamored of science and its marriage to super computers to devour us as sorting data, spitting us out in rational, viable and sensible, but inanimate solutions.
The economy has been reduced to a big machine with us as its data. Quantitative macroeconomic models win Nobel Prizes for the data processors.
Data has no face. There is no need for ethics or morality, as emotions and psychology have been made irrelevant. New York Times columnist captures the sense of this in a syllogism:
“If the government borrows $1 and then spends it, it will produce $1.50 worth of economic activity. If the government spends $800 billion on a stimulus package, that will produce 3.5 million in new jobs. Everything is rigorous. Everything is science.”
The only problem is that the stimulus package has produced only a fraction of the jobs promised, while unemployment stubbornly remains at 9.6 percent.
American citizens in the last thirty years have not been engaged as people but only as members of the drone brigade.
* * *
The History Channel recently had a segment on WWII in which fireside chats of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the narrative overlay as the war progressed.
The claim is President Obama cannot relate to ordinary citizens because of his intelligence, sophistication and distance culturally from them. FDR was a member of America’s aristocratic class, yet every citizen glued to the radio of those fireside chats felt he was speaking directly to them.
It made a difference. It was a boom to morale, which translated into industry, purpose and commitment to the war effort at great personal sacrifice because people felt connected. They trusted their president to level with them and keep them informed.
We have lost this connection. There seems no one on the horizon to restore it. Instead, the breach grows wider as self-delusion increases and self-responsibility decreases with many escaping into venality, corruption, greed and incompetence.
* * *
ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE (2010)
Bethany McLean of Vanity Fair and Joe Nocera of The New York Times have written a book of the recent financial crisis. It is not a “what” book but a “why” book, a hidden history of the recent financial crisis.
Charlie Rose (November 18, 2010) asked Joe Nocera why he was so hard on Goldman Sachs of Wall Street. Nocera didn’t dodge the question.
The firm’s core principle, he said, was that clients come first. Instead Goldman Sachs took full advantage of clients shoving lousy securities down their throats. The firm’s risk and financial exposure was reduced if not eliminated by laying the whole financial burden on clients.
Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients what it actually thought of these toxic securities.
* * *
Bethany McLean explained that ethically it was a scam for Wall Street from the beginning. Wall Street would buy up mortgages, package them, and then sell them off to investors. Meanwhile, Wall Street was saying it was doing its diligence, which meant investigating these mortgages to see if they were sound. They didn’t do this because they knew they weren’t.
She went on to say she thought it was wrong for the “mortgage brokers” around the country to make loans to people they knew couldn’t afford them, getting borrowers to lie as to their assets so that they would qualify for these loans.
She also thought it was questionable for “regulators” in Washington, DC to look the other way when they heard the same story again and again from people who were getting loans they couldn’t afford and would have no way to pay them back.
* * *
Nocera said that “this thing” had been happening over the past thirty years. It started with mortgage-backed securities to create new markets and release capital for home ownership on a wide scale.
McLean could see how good intentions initially drifted to a peculiar collusion between rating agencies and the government. The ratings problem couldn’t have occurred without the government’s participation. Sub-prime lending and securities needed the participation of Freddie Mae and Freddie Mac, especially Freddie Mae.
* * *
The key to getting a loan was the ratings. The AAA rating was almost a guarantee of getting a loan.
Several things happened. The AAA rating became increasingly bogus. The traditional connection between the borrower and the lender (bank) was cut. This connection had existed for centuries between a bank willing to loan to a borrower who wanted to buy a house and a bank having the capital on hand. A bank wouldn’t loan money if it didn’t have the capital reserve to loan. A loaner wouldn’t be able to borrow if he didn’t qualify.
Once that was cut, mortgages were packaged into securities, and the securities into derivatives, with these in turn sold to investors. The risk was no longer with the bank. If fact, it was no longer with Wall Street. The risk was shipped off to investors in mortgage-backed securities. It was immaterial to the bank or Wall Street if the loan application was legitimate or not, which was the beginning of the horror story.
The moral and ethical authority of the banking was suspended to the point of non-existent.
* * *
McLean noted that the ideology of modern finance was that innovation is always good, and the market is always right. This was an implicit/explicit relationship: implicitly everyone thought the same way, and explicitly money was changing hands.
* * *
Nocera added that the Wall Street securities machine got built, and it used sub prime loans as fodder to keep it running. As the machine got bigger and more complex, few using it understood it, and if they did, they were operating just this side of criminality.
Eventually, nobody wanted AAA rated loans became they were essentially toxic. Incredibly, Merrill Lynch bought all these AAA securities and went belly up from $5 billion to $50 billion with no one quite sure how it happened.
* * *
McLean said that in many ways the story of the economic crisis is the story of human nature:
(1) Self-delusion;
(2) Venality
(3) Corruption.
The self-delusion was the fact that people didn’t want to see what was right in from of them; venality was the ability to look at AAA ratings as legitimate despite the evidence to the contrary; and corruption was the insensitivity of the exploiters to the millions of trusting homeowners to a system they didn’t understand but believed was ethical when it was not.
A physicist who had been a trader said Wall Street was quantitatively illiterate, unable to look at the numbers under the numbers to understand what they meant. He added, “We fell for our own scam,” meaning people on Wall Street weren’t as smart as they thought they were. Still, people on Wall Street that were basically incompetent walked off with annual incomes from $10 million to $165 million.
* * *
Have the risk management models or the rating agencies lost favor? McLean and Nocera don’t think so. People have lost trust in Wall Street, in these models and rating agencies, but business as usual continues as if nothing has been learned.
* * *
McLean, who wrote a book on Enron, says the crisis is the story of people with the complex mingling of self-delusion with corruption. It is a cast of characters with a range of fatal flaws, a complicated mixture of ambition and greed.
Greed is not ethical but it is also not illegal. She can see few cases of this greed being criminally prosecuted.
* * *
Given the absence of frugality and restrain over the past thirty years, and the stagnant income for working Americans, McLean says home ownership and sub prime lending was always at its core about people using their homes as a piggybank to refinance. People would then use the money to booster their stander of living. If people hadn’t been able to do this, she adds, consumer spending wouldn’t have been what it was.
People, she continues, who wanted a fixed rate 30-year mortgage like their parents had, were talked into optimal adjustable rate mortgages. Lenders did this because they could make more money by selling these instruments to Wall Street, which in turn could repackage them and sell them to investors for still more money. It had a snowball effect until the meltdown in 2008.
* * *
Nocera adds it doesn’t matter whether sub prime lenders were making predatory loans, or whether borrowers were taking advantage of lenders buying houses they couldn’t afford. The fact remains millions of Americans were buying homes they couldn’t afford and could never pay back.
He asks, isn’t that a systemic problem? Shouldn’t Wall Street been able to see that was going to cause a heap of trouble? The answer is that most of them on Wall Street making millions of dollars weren’t competent to answer that question, but simply road the tide.
* * *
TRUST IS WHAT MAKES THE WORLD GO AROUND
Ireland is now in financial trouble perhaps even worse than Greece. It needs cash to keep banks afloat with a current debt level of 32 percent of Gross Domestic Product compared to that of Greece of 15.5 percent.
The problem is Ireland doesn’t trust the Euro Zone Commission to bail it out without losing its national integrity and autonomy. It fears interference in its governance.
Unemployment in the United States is reported at 9.6 percent while banks and companies are sitting on more than $2 trillion that they are reluctant to pour into the marketplace for lack of trust of the economic system.
China is booming but still keeps it currency below the rate the world-at-large would like. It does so for many national reasons not least of which is its lack of trust of the world market, particularly the United States economy.
Trust is something that must be earned, and when trust is broken sometimes it can never be repaired.
* * *
A TRUST BUILDING EXERCISE
The economic engine of trust is on display in every organization.
When I was an organizational development (OD) psychologist at Honeywell Avionics, the program manager of a major program came to me, said his program was in crisis and he would like a team building session as soon as possible.
“How about tonight?” I said. “I can make arrangements with the hotel next door.”
“Tonight?” he asked.
“You said you were in crisis. We can do it right after work.”
He rubbed his jaw. “I don’t know if everyone will be on board for that.”
“You’re the program manage. Make it imperative.” And he did.
* * *
The program was in the range of $50 million and it was over budget and behind schedule, and there was bickering, finger pointing, and one little skirmish between two key people involving pushing and name-calling.
Involved were the program management staff, engineering, planning, product assurance, contracts administration, technical support, system analysts, and model building in manufacturing. In total, there were thirty people.
The hotel provided soft drinks, coffee and sandwiches. After everyone ate, the program manager stated the purpose of the meeting. This was met with glum faces. Nobody wanted to be there, couldn’t wait for this, whatever this was, to get over.
It helped that I was familiar to them and had worked with them in their areas. Still, they were surprised and then bemused when I said, “I don’t want to be here anymore than you do. Let’s go home!” They looked startled, and then laughed, knowing I was putting them on.
* * *
We got down to business. Counting off “one, two, three, four, five” formed six groups. People of the same discipline tend to sit together. This broke them up as the ones formed a group, the twos a group, and so on. Everyone, including the program manager participated.
Each group was given flip chart paper and a marker, and asked to choose a leader, and then tabulate specifics to deal with program problems, and what could be done about them. The main idea is to get them talking, discussing, and exchanging information..
By the time this detail was completed, and everyone reported back to the assembled group with their ideas, it was just past 10 p.m. The last report completed, everyone started to get up from their chairs to go home. They were tired after an eight-hour day, and a six-hour seminar.
Suddenly, someone said, “But we haven’t accomplished anything. We’re not done.”
It was true.
The walls were papered with flipcharts venting specific and collective frustrations, but territorial imperatives had not been breached, which was the key to everything.
As they looked to me frozen in step to leave, someone said, “Why aren’t we done? What else can we do?”
“We are not done, and the reason is,” I said as I walked around the room and wrote across the flipcharts with a red marker in large letters, “because TRUST IS STILL THE ISSUE.”
Everyone sat back down without prompting. The word “trust” appeared to prick their consciences dropping their defenses. They were exhausted but the word “trust” appeared to hit them like a bolt out of the blue. It tapped something dormant in them
For the better part of the next hour and one half they talked, often everyone at the same time, seemingly taking bullets from ideas from the flipcharts and weaving them into a tapestry that made a single cloth. It was near midnight when the meeting broke up.
The program manager came over to me, and asked, “Did you know this would happen?”
“If people are sincere, and they are capable of letting their hair down, it can happen. These are sincere people.”
“Were you going to let them go without finishing?”
“Of course.”
“Of course?”
“It was their show, not mine. I was just an observer.”
“Right! Well, everything changed when you wrote TRUST IS STILL THE ISSUE on the flipcharts.”
“No, that’s not true. Everything changed when your man said they weren’t done. I merely put before their eyes what they were already thinking.”
“Then they solved their own problem.”
“That’s the only solution there is.”
The program manager shook his head. “If you say so.”
* * *
Trust was at issue, and once that bridge was crossed, the program was given new life while the walls between disciplines started to tumble down.
Former Senator Alan Simpson said it took the Deficit Reduction Commission months to establish trust. Sometimes putting people with artificial barriers between them in a room, the trust issue surfaces and gets battered about. Synergistic contribution is possible in that climate of civil conflict and exchange. Anything is possible with trust. Nothing is possible without trust.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 18, 2010
* * *
REFERENCE:
As with all my missives, I attempt to put a human face on my wonderings. My interest is more in the "why" (i.e., the human cause) and less with the "what" (i.e., the mechanics of the paralysis) of our economic decline.
My sense is that a period of exponential boom (1950 – 1980) was followed by a period of existential bust (1980 – 2010). People in the know, who are in the business of tracking such things, confirm my premise.
We are what we think, and what we think we don’t always know, and worse yet, as I will show here, those who we think know, don’t as well, and so the blind lead the blind sometimes knowingly and sometimes not into distrust, corruption, incompetence, and greed.
It all starts with ordinary people who suspend self-responsibility, which allow them to be taken in with something that is too good to be true, but never is. Trust is always at issue.
* * *
PRESIDENT OBAMA’S DEFICIT REDUCTION COMMISSION
Former Wyoming US Senator Alan Simpson (1979 – 1997) on PBSTV with Charlie Rose (Wednesday, November 17, 2010) said that for the last seventy-five years, or since the mid-1930s, people have been sent to Washington, DC to “bring home the bacon.”
People would say, “You haven’t helped us get a new dam or new visiting center.” Simpson said he would reply, “You have a dam and a visiting center. I won’t sign on for this.” They would reply, “What kind of a senator are you?”
He would be meeting citizens in a town hall, and they would say, “We need this or that.” A colleague would say to a staffer, “Write that down.” It would become an earmark like the bridge in Alaska that goes nowhere.
Greed is not new. Nor is it confined to Wall Street.
Simpson along with Erskine Bowles, former chief of staff in President Clinton’s Administration, heads President Obama's “Deficit Reduction Commission.” It is a committee of eighteen members with fourteen members having to agree on the proposal before it can be sent to Congress for consideration. The members of the commission are equally divided between Democrats and Republicans.
The aim of the commission is to take $4 trillion out of the budget in ten years. This means looking at Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Department of Defense budget, income tax deductions, and several other entitlements and tax saving opportunities.
Simpson and Bowles have been meeting since January with this commission attempting to find a common ground. Simpson confessed, “It took months since January to establish trust. This town (Washington, DC) is devoid of trust. It took us literally three to four months to trust each other.” How did they do it?
Nobody left the room. It took a long time for everyone to get passed stereotypes and personal and political biases.
* * *
THE DRONE BRIGADE
We have gotten used to economic “experts” talking too fast beginning sentences by holding out their hands pointing on fingers problems from the national debt to global warming, from tax codes to fiscal insolvency. We take their glibness for intelligence and competence. Over the past thirty years, we have relied on such people not only to know what they are talking about, but also to be sincerely thinking in terms of our best interests.
We have become enamored of science and its marriage to super computers to devour us as sorting data, spitting us out in rational, viable and sensible, but inanimate solutions.
The economy has been reduced to a big machine with us as its data. Quantitative macroeconomic models win Nobel Prizes for the data processors.
Data has no face. There is no need for ethics or morality, as emotions and psychology have been made irrelevant. New York Times columnist captures the sense of this in a syllogism:
“If the government borrows $1 and then spends it, it will produce $1.50 worth of economic activity. If the government spends $800 billion on a stimulus package, that will produce 3.5 million in new jobs. Everything is rigorous. Everything is science.”
The only problem is that the stimulus package has produced only a fraction of the jobs promised, while unemployment stubbornly remains at 9.6 percent.
American citizens in the last thirty years have not been engaged as people but only as members of the drone brigade.
* * *
The History Channel recently had a segment on WWII in which fireside chats of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the narrative overlay as the war progressed.
The claim is President Obama cannot relate to ordinary citizens because of his intelligence, sophistication and distance culturally from them. FDR was a member of America’s aristocratic class, yet every citizen glued to the radio of those fireside chats felt he was speaking directly to them.
It made a difference. It was a boom to morale, which translated into industry, purpose and commitment to the war effort at great personal sacrifice because people felt connected. They trusted their president to level with them and keep them informed.
We have lost this connection. There seems no one on the horizon to restore it. Instead, the breach grows wider as self-delusion increases and self-responsibility decreases with many escaping into venality, corruption, greed and incompetence.
* * *
ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE (2010)
Bethany McLean of Vanity Fair and Joe Nocera of The New York Times have written a book of the recent financial crisis. It is not a “what” book but a “why” book, a hidden history of the recent financial crisis.
Charlie Rose (November 18, 2010) asked Joe Nocera why he was so hard on Goldman Sachs of Wall Street. Nocera didn’t dodge the question.
The firm’s core principle, he said, was that clients come first. Instead Goldman Sachs took full advantage of clients shoving lousy securities down their throats. The firm’s risk and financial exposure was reduced if not eliminated by laying the whole financial burden on clients.
Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients what it actually thought of these toxic securities.
* * *
Bethany McLean explained that ethically it was a scam for Wall Street from the beginning. Wall Street would buy up mortgages, package them, and then sell them off to investors. Meanwhile, Wall Street was saying it was doing its diligence, which meant investigating these mortgages to see if they were sound. They didn’t do this because they knew they weren’t.
She went on to say she thought it was wrong for the “mortgage brokers” around the country to make loans to people they knew couldn’t afford them, getting borrowers to lie as to their assets so that they would qualify for these loans.
She also thought it was questionable for “regulators” in Washington, DC to look the other way when they heard the same story again and again from people who were getting loans they couldn’t afford and would have no way to pay them back.
* * *
Nocera said that “this thing” had been happening over the past thirty years. It started with mortgage-backed securities to create new markets and release capital for home ownership on a wide scale.
McLean could see how good intentions initially drifted to a peculiar collusion between rating agencies and the government. The ratings problem couldn’t have occurred without the government’s participation. Sub-prime lending and securities needed the participation of Freddie Mae and Freddie Mac, especially Freddie Mae.
* * *
The key to getting a loan was the ratings. The AAA rating was almost a guarantee of getting a loan.
Several things happened. The AAA rating became increasingly bogus. The traditional connection between the borrower and the lender (bank) was cut. This connection had existed for centuries between a bank willing to loan to a borrower who wanted to buy a house and a bank having the capital on hand. A bank wouldn’t loan money if it didn’t have the capital reserve to loan. A loaner wouldn’t be able to borrow if he didn’t qualify.
Once that was cut, mortgages were packaged into securities, and the securities into derivatives, with these in turn sold to investors. The risk was no longer with the bank. If fact, it was no longer with Wall Street. The risk was shipped off to investors in mortgage-backed securities. It was immaterial to the bank or Wall Street if the loan application was legitimate or not, which was the beginning of the horror story.
The moral and ethical authority of the banking was suspended to the point of non-existent.
* * *
McLean noted that the ideology of modern finance was that innovation is always good, and the market is always right. This was an implicit/explicit relationship: implicitly everyone thought the same way, and explicitly money was changing hands.
* * *
Nocera added that the Wall Street securities machine got built, and it used sub prime loans as fodder to keep it running. As the machine got bigger and more complex, few using it understood it, and if they did, they were operating just this side of criminality.
Eventually, nobody wanted AAA rated loans became they were essentially toxic. Incredibly, Merrill Lynch bought all these AAA securities and went belly up from $5 billion to $50 billion with no one quite sure how it happened.
* * *
McLean said that in many ways the story of the economic crisis is the story of human nature:
(1) Self-delusion;
(2) Venality
(3) Corruption.
The self-delusion was the fact that people didn’t want to see what was right in from of them; venality was the ability to look at AAA ratings as legitimate despite the evidence to the contrary; and corruption was the insensitivity of the exploiters to the millions of trusting homeowners to a system they didn’t understand but believed was ethical when it was not.
A physicist who had been a trader said Wall Street was quantitatively illiterate, unable to look at the numbers under the numbers to understand what they meant. He added, “We fell for our own scam,” meaning people on Wall Street weren’t as smart as they thought they were. Still, people on Wall Street that were basically incompetent walked off with annual incomes from $10 million to $165 million.
* * *
Have the risk management models or the rating agencies lost favor? McLean and Nocera don’t think so. People have lost trust in Wall Street, in these models and rating agencies, but business as usual continues as if nothing has been learned.
* * *
McLean, who wrote a book on Enron, says the crisis is the story of people with the complex mingling of self-delusion with corruption. It is a cast of characters with a range of fatal flaws, a complicated mixture of ambition and greed.
Greed is not ethical but it is also not illegal. She can see few cases of this greed being criminally prosecuted.
* * *
Given the absence of frugality and restrain over the past thirty years, and the stagnant income for working Americans, McLean says home ownership and sub prime lending was always at its core about people using their homes as a piggybank to refinance. People would then use the money to booster their stander of living. If people hadn’t been able to do this, she adds, consumer spending wouldn’t have been what it was.
People, she continues, who wanted a fixed rate 30-year mortgage like their parents had, were talked into optimal adjustable rate mortgages. Lenders did this because they could make more money by selling these instruments to Wall Street, which in turn could repackage them and sell them to investors for still more money. It had a snowball effect until the meltdown in 2008.
* * *
Nocera adds it doesn’t matter whether sub prime lenders were making predatory loans, or whether borrowers were taking advantage of lenders buying houses they couldn’t afford. The fact remains millions of Americans were buying homes they couldn’t afford and could never pay back.
He asks, isn’t that a systemic problem? Shouldn’t Wall Street been able to see that was going to cause a heap of trouble? The answer is that most of them on Wall Street making millions of dollars weren’t competent to answer that question, but simply road the tide.
* * *
TRUST IS WHAT MAKES THE WORLD GO AROUND
Ireland is now in financial trouble perhaps even worse than Greece. It needs cash to keep banks afloat with a current debt level of 32 percent of Gross Domestic Product compared to that of Greece of 15.5 percent.
The problem is Ireland doesn’t trust the Euro Zone Commission to bail it out without losing its national integrity and autonomy. It fears interference in its governance.
Unemployment in the United States is reported at 9.6 percent while banks and companies are sitting on more than $2 trillion that they are reluctant to pour into the marketplace for lack of trust of the economic system.
China is booming but still keeps it currency below the rate the world-at-large would like. It does so for many national reasons not least of which is its lack of trust of the world market, particularly the United States economy.
Trust is something that must be earned, and when trust is broken sometimes it can never be repaired.
* * *
A TRUST BUILDING EXERCISE
The economic engine of trust is on display in every organization.
When I was an organizational development (OD) psychologist at Honeywell Avionics, the program manager of a major program came to me, said his program was in crisis and he would like a team building session as soon as possible.
“How about tonight?” I said. “I can make arrangements with the hotel next door.”
“Tonight?” he asked.
“You said you were in crisis. We can do it right after work.”
He rubbed his jaw. “I don’t know if everyone will be on board for that.”
“You’re the program manage. Make it imperative.” And he did.
* * *
The program was in the range of $50 million and it was over budget and behind schedule, and there was bickering, finger pointing, and one little skirmish between two key people involving pushing and name-calling.
Involved were the program management staff, engineering, planning, product assurance, contracts administration, technical support, system analysts, and model building in manufacturing. In total, there were thirty people.
The hotel provided soft drinks, coffee and sandwiches. After everyone ate, the program manager stated the purpose of the meeting. This was met with glum faces. Nobody wanted to be there, couldn’t wait for this, whatever this was, to get over.
It helped that I was familiar to them and had worked with them in their areas. Still, they were surprised and then bemused when I said, “I don’t want to be here anymore than you do. Let’s go home!” They looked startled, and then laughed, knowing I was putting them on.
* * *
We got down to business. Counting off “one, two, three, four, five” formed six groups. People of the same discipline tend to sit together. This broke them up as the ones formed a group, the twos a group, and so on. Everyone, including the program manager participated.
Each group was given flip chart paper and a marker, and asked to choose a leader, and then tabulate specifics to deal with program problems, and what could be done about them. The main idea is to get them talking, discussing, and exchanging information..
By the time this detail was completed, and everyone reported back to the assembled group with their ideas, it was just past 10 p.m. The last report completed, everyone started to get up from their chairs to go home. They were tired after an eight-hour day, and a six-hour seminar.
Suddenly, someone said, “But we haven’t accomplished anything. We’re not done.”
It was true.
The walls were papered with flipcharts venting specific and collective frustrations, but territorial imperatives had not been breached, which was the key to everything.
As they looked to me frozen in step to leave, someone said, “Why aren’t we done? What else can we do?”
“We are not done, and the reason is,” I said as I walked around the room and wrote across the flipcharts with a red marker in large letters, “because TRUST IS STILL THE ISSUE.”
Everyone sat back down without prompting. The word “trust” appeared to prick their consciences dropping their defenses. They were exhausted but the word “trust” appeared to hit them like a bolt out of the blue. It tapped something dormant in them
For the better part of the next hour and one half they talked, often everyone at the same time, seemingly taking bullets from ideas from the flipcharts and weaving them into a tapestry that made a single cloth. It was near midnight when the meeting broke up.
The program manager came over to me, and asked, “Did you know this would happen?”
“If people are sincere, and they are capable of letting their hair down, it can happen. These are sincere people.”
“Were you going to let them go without finishing?”
“Of course.”
“Of course?”
“It was their show, not mine. I was just an observer.”
“Right! Well, everything changed when you wrote TRUST IS STILL THE ISSUE on the flipcharts.”
“No, that’s not true. Everything changed when your man said they weren’t done. I merely put before their eyes what they were already thinking.”
“Then they solved their own problem.”
“That’s the only solution there is.”
The program manager shook his head. “If you say so.”
* * *
Trust was at issue, and once that bridge was crossed, the program was given new life while the walls between disciplines started to tumble down.
Former Senator Alan Simpson said it took the Deficit Reduction Commission months to establish trust. Sometimes putting people with artificial barriers between them in a room, the trust issue surfaces and gets battered about. Synergistic contribution is possible in that climate of civil conflict and exchange. Anything is possible with trust. Nothing is possible without trust.
* * *
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
WHAT IF THE PROBLEM WITH MATH AND SCIENCE SCORES OF STUDENTS IS SIMPLY A CULTURAL MINDSET?
WHAT IF THE PROBLEM WITH MATH AND SCIENCE SCORES OF STUDENTS IS SIMPLY A CULTURAL MINDSET?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 16, 2010
* * *
The thought occurred to me that we might be looking at this problem of anemic standard test scores on science and mathematics from the wrong end.
When I came with Honeywell Avionics in 1980 from a previous career in chemical research and development, field chemical engineering, field management and corporate management, I witnessed something that would have been humorous if it weren’t so stultifying.
Human resources were intimidated by engineering.
That meant engineering was given cart blanche in training and development. There was no rhyme or reason, no system or coordination, no record keeping. Training and development was ostensibly an award system to engineers to attend cushy conferences in such places as San Francisco, Las Vegas and Denver. It was an elitist mindset that said engineers stir the drink, so back off! Human resources did.
Not being intimidated by engineers, I made a study and discovered three quarters of our 1,000 engineers were working on technology developed after they ended their formal education. Engineers’ income was essentially based on seniority with little to do with skill levels or competence. Meanwhile, newly graduated engineers at the low end of the pay scale had the technology to keep programs current.
The answer was a technical education program for all engineers in all disciplines, which not only was embraced but also soared as obsolescent skills were addressed.
* * *
Intimidation is not always so apparent.
Few organizations will admit it, but I sense there is a theology of organization that prevents teachers of science and mathematics from being sufficiently protected from moral relativism. William Livingston addresses this in THE DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010), but not as I imply here.
It is difficult for science and mathematics to thrive in a spiritual climate of theological opinions and infallible administrative authority when science deals only with facts. The science and math teaching corps, I sense, is intimidated by this cultural mindset, and therefore needs a wall of separation to freely embrace their teaching objectives.
Put another way, there appears a “discomfort zone” between the two. My sense is that teachers of science and mathematics avoid the breach, as they attempt to stay on the safe side of the divide, which penalizes students and teachers alike.
I further suggest that more students would go into teaching math and science if the culture (mindset) of classroom were more a fact-based rather than a faith-based climate, and less the bureaucratic zoo that it appears to be.
Moreover, I suggest students would find science and mathematics less intimidating if the curriculum could evolve in open laboratory like environment. Students like laboratories.
The United States, I submit, will never improve science and math test scores simply with more money, more laboratories, and more sophisticated equipment. It must end the power struggle between humanism (civil religion) and scientific rationalism. School boards tend to be comfortable with the former because it is consistent with their politics and moral judgment, and not with the latter, the intrigue of empirical data and scientific analysis.
I have said elsewhere that educational institutions are like factories that I had worked in as a boy. My thinking has matured to the point that I now see them more like religious institutions. This is not as strange as it might seem as most of them grew out of such origins. Graduates of our most pristine institutions have a cookie cutter resemblance except for foreign students, who more resemble gear heads and nerds.
Perhaps without intending to do so, this faith-based institutional connection has become a significant player in the dumbing down of the science curriculum at the elementary and secondary educational level. You don’t have to take my word for it just look at national statistics.
Privileged students -- my granddaughter and grandson are benefactors of a private school – are in the freshman and junior class respectively, and both have had or are now taking algebra, geometry, college algebra and trigonometry, and my grandson is now taking solid geometry and calculus, and will complete integral and differential calculus next year.
Scientific knowledge is exploding exponentially since the midpoint of the twentieth century. To attempt to maintain a scientific curriculum in elementary and secondary school in a climate of regressive norms is to inflict much damage, not only in missed opportunity for students in math and science, but in lower morale for teachers and students, alike.
This is my take on the subject, what is yours?
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 16, 2010
* * *
The thought occurred to me that we might be looking at this problem of anemic standard test scores on science and mathematics from the wrong end.
When I came with Honeywell Avionics in 1980 from a previous career in chemical research and development, field chemical engineering, field management and corporate management, I witnessed something that would have been humorous if it weren’t so stultifying.
Human resources were intimidated by engineering.
That meant engineering was given cart blanche in training and development. There was no rhyme or reason, no system or coordination, no record keeping. Training and development was ostensibly an award system to engineers to attend cushy conferences in such places as San Francisco, Las Vegas and Denver. It was an elitist mindset that said engineers stir the drink, so back off! Human resources did.
Not being intimidated by engineers, I made a study and discovered three quarters of our 1,000 engineers were working on technology developed after they ended their formal education. Engineers’ income was essentially based on seniority with little to do with skill levels or competence. Meanwhile, newly graduated engineers at the low end of the pay scale had the technology to keep programs current.
The answer was a technical education program for all engineers in all disciplines, which not only was embraced but also soared as obsolescent skills were addressed.
* * *
Intimidation is not always so apparent.
Few organizations will admit it, but I sense there is a theology of organization that prevents teachers of science and mathematics from being sufficiently protected from moral relativism. William Livingston addresses this in THE DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010), but not as I imply here.
It is difficult for science and mathematics to thrive in a spiritual climate of theological opinions and infallible administrative authority when science deals only with facts. The science and math teaching corps, I sense, is intimidated by this cultural mindset, and therefore needs a wall of separation to freely embrace their teaching objectives.
Put another way, there appears a “discomfort zone” between the two. My sense is that teachers of science and mathematics avoid the breach, as they attempt to stay on the safe side of the divide, which penalizes students and teachers alike.
I further suggest that more students would go into teaching math and science if the culture (mindset) of classroom were more a fact-based rather than a faith-based climate, and less the bureaucratic zoo that it appears to be.
Moreover, I suggest students would find science and mathematics less intimidating if the curriculum could evolve in open laboratory like environment. Students like laboratories.
The United States, I submit, will never improve science and math test scores simply with more money, more laboratories, and more sophisticated equipment. It must end the power struggle between humanism (civil religion) and scientific rationalism. School boards tend to be comfortable with the former because it is consistent with their politics and moral judgment, and not with the latter, the intrigue of empirical data and scientific analysis.
I have said elsewhere that educational institutions are like factories that I had worked in as a boy. My thinking has matured to the point that I now see them more like religious institutions. This is not as strange as it might seem as most of them grew out of such origins. Graduates of our most pristine institutions have a cookie cutter resemblance except for foreign students, who more resemble gear heads and nerds.
Perhaps without intending to do so, this faith-based institutional connection has become a significant player in the dumbing down of the science curriculum at the elementary and secondary educational level. You don’t have to take my word for it just look at national statistics.
Privileged students -- my granddaughter and grandson are benefactors of a private school – are in the freshman and junior class respectively, and both have had or are now taking algebra, geometry, college algebra and trigonometry, and my grandson is now taking solid geometry and calculus, and will complete integral and differential calculus next year.
Scientific knowledge is exploding exponentially since the midpoint of the twentieth century. To attempt to maintain a scientific curriculum in elementary and secondary school in a climate of regressive norms is to inflict much damage, not only in missed opportunity for students in math and science, but in lower morale for teachers and students, alike.
This is my take on the subject, what is yours?
* * *
WHAT PEOPLE THINK THEY KNOW, THEY DON'T, WHAT PEOPLE THINK THEY DON'T KNOW, THEY DO!
WHAT PEOPLE THINK THEY KNOW, THEY DON’T, WHAT PEOPLE THINK THEY DON’T KNOW, THEY DO!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 16, 2010
* * *
REFERENCE:
Author William L. Livingston IV of DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010) sent me an interesting missive that he had created independent of the maturations of my own thoughts, as I was about to walk. Remodeling his domain resulted in cutting him off from his tool kit, but not from his mind.
The mind is an interesting playground that bubbles up new and sometimes tantalizing thoughts when frustrated, blocked from access to our comfort zone, or failure to make meaningful connection. That is my problem not necessary my author friend’s.
Since I am not inside his head, nor privy to his mind, my only clue is what he shares with me in spontaneous moments where the mind as playground doesn’t attempt to create meaningful algorithms, but finds a way for the bubbles to escape their cultural prison only to burst quickly as bubbles do. Consequently, we’re always thinking in remnants. It is good for the soul to recognize and accept this limitation of mind because it allows the mind to go somewhere from nowhere and happily forward in contradiction. The Holy Grail is zero entropy, which requires a climb out of our limitations whatever they may be.
* * *
AUTHOR LIVINGSTON WRITES:
Revisiting my old haunts with the new cognitive framework has been quite a jolt. Stuff I didn't question at the time now jumps out at me as either profound or logically defective. It shows me how close one can be to "enlightenment" and remain stuck in miserable mode. Almost there is nowhere.
An example of benchmarking with the DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (D4P), below, has taken several items usually handled as separate attributes and fused them together. What's interesting is that when I feed back my redo to the original sources, the response is silence. The killer, I believe, is Turing's thesis about intelligence. When it comes to "meanings" about such things, I am far worse than random chance. Outsource to Fisher (He is referring to me and my natural inclination to be random).
The original, by a noted philosopher, was about self-organizing systems. The parts that fit were very good. The parts that missed, missed by light-years.
Self-organization is exhibited in some recursion processes where effective goal-seeking activity occurs without planning or a central authority. Self-organization derives from local interaction of the elements comprising the system and it is always spontaneous. Interaction of elements is both parallel and distributed, depending on the disturbance. For some events, all elements act at the same time. For others, they don’t. With no element a coordinator/manager, each element is autonomous.
Since institutions cannot be self-organizing, operational command and control for organizing to purpose comes at extra cost. Organization imposed cannot solve problems that require intelligence building. Impressing the institutional ideology (infallible) on the troops to support command and control is intolerant of the autonomy intrinsic to effective goal seeking. Recursion and repetition comprise a joint restriction writ large.
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
William,
I was preparing for my daily walk, and I was thinking of many things, then Clarence Darrow slipped into my consciousness. Maybe you and I are telepathic. We humans have been essentially the same for thousands of years. Could we be evolving? I say this not because of instinct or motivation, but necessity. The writing is on the wall, and I sense Darrow got a glimpse of it.
In any case, I tend to think in letterhead themes such as this: "What we think we know, we don't, and what we don't know, we do." Immediately, I thought of writing a piece about it with a lead in with Darrow. But BB would not be happy, as I must ready my novel for publication.
My readers are an eclectic group, wise, energetic, knowledgeable, successful, and creatures of the system, victims of institutions, smothered in paradigms and puzzles of complexity that you present and attempt to unravel in D4P to lower our entropy.
* * *
WHO REMEMBERS A BOOK TITLED “THE WORKER, ALONE” (1995)?
There are many ways to postpone the inevitable, to slow down the rush to oblivion, to bring some sense into the nonsense of the prevailing narrative, to take a stand even if it is on a collapsing cardboard box. I guess that would describe my effort and me.
My latest career has been in organizational development (OD), which is all about self-organizing. I failed to get readers attention with “The Worker, Alone,” although, I think you will agree, these prescient quotations have not withered in provocative freshness. I share them with you as caveat to your quest for getting somewhere in nowhere land:
(1) “Most workers drift into their occupations, many others feel pushed into unwanted careers. Few consider what the job means to them. To derive satisfaction from a job, the worker must be interested in the work. Too many treat work as a prison and find comfort in the victim complex, as if to say, I have no control over my destiny. These workers become bitter, perhaps even hostile in their relationships in the workplace, as they feel trapped. But who is to blame?”
(2) “Workers see economic parity as their birthright. It has never happened before, and it is unlikely to happen in the future. The proportionate distribution of wealth has not changed dramatically since the seventeenth century.”
(3) “Workers insist in the belief that they live in a classless society. Workers cannot accept that the boom is over. Meanwhile, politicians exploit this ambivalence. Both political parties assure workers that the boom is not over. Both sound the same; the rhetoric is the same, the assumptions identical. The common good, upon which the Republic was founded, now a radical idea, is missing, replaced in both parties by majority interest. Polling controls the mind of the time.”
(4) “Democracy loves mediocrity, but abhors, in equal measure, brilliance, idiosyncrasy, genius, or curmudgeons of any kind. Film action heroes, athletes and murderers compete for this worker’s limited attention span. The media give these superstars more exposure in twenty four hours than an iconoclastic Richard Feynman or cerebral Isaiah Berlin receive in a lifetime.”
(5) “For the past quarter century, we have had a bombardment of ideas on how to manage change. Actually, change in the workplace is on only secondary importance. Change will come about naturally, over time, once workers and managers bring about change in themselves. Order comes from within. To establish order takes more than good intentions, more than a change in attitude. Order requires a radical change in mentality, a structural change in the way workers and managers minds view the world. Order requires the individual going against the grain.”
That was 1995, thirteen years before the economic meltdown in 2008. Clearly, what we think we know, we don’t.
My sense is the only way we can change this is to somehow make connection with what we think we don’t know, but do. Meanwhile, entropy is a gaining on us.
* * *
WHAT PEOPLE WANT
People don’t want you to mess with their minds. They want to believe the myths of their religion that have been programmed into them; the myths of their culture and its singular place in the firmament; the myths of their heroes as their being strong, focused, confident and true and not weak, lost, confused and dissembling as they are. The list could go on for pages.
What people want and what they know is what they refuse to think they know, and that is that the myth parade is a charade, a collage of worn out ideas that are stubbornly maintained for how else can they go forward without thinking? .
Civilizations as well as individuals have cognitive biases, and they have evolved over time into truisms, or some kind of ism.
You are taking measure of entropy by fighting reality with D4P, and people – engineers as well as others – are caught up in the chaos of complexity not only of change but in the persistence of these myths that now serve them so poorly.
* * *
Few books have disturbed me (as that is the correct word) as much as D4P. It is a radical document that blasts through the safety net of our cognitive dissonance to leave nowhere land for somewhere land, a place we’ve never been before, and are therefore afraid to go.
No one knows better than you that for an idea to take hold it must have some remnants of that idea already in place. My wonder is if there is enough there to make it so. I certainly want to think it is so.
For that to happen, I believe, and I think you are attempting to do this, readers must discover that what they think they don’t know, they do. Your book will cause pain and discomfort for those who prefer not to think at all but only to believe what they have been programmed to believe, and to think everything will be all right in the end. It won’t.
* * *
I have not read MARK TWAIN's autobiography, but he comes to mind. Twain was a freethinker and had a very dark side to his mind, a side that he didn’t want exposed until he was dead for one hundred years, which happens to be 2010. His reputation is secure but his concerns about religion, institutions, ideologies and human intransigence are closer I suspect to your ideas – if extracts I have read are any example. You, unfortunately, are without a one hundred year cushion.
* * *
CLARENCE DARROW, DARWIN, AND EVOLUTION AS EPILOGUE
William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes "monkey trial" still clung to the belief that the whale swallowed Jonah and regurgitated him, as he believed all the miracles of the Bible.
Darrow asked Bryan if God commanded the sun to stand still so that Joshua and the Israelites could avoid the slaughter, as the Bible says, or did Bryan believe the sun moved around the earth as people believed in biblical times?
Bryan was forced to believe the earth moved around the sun, forcing him to acknowledge much of the bible is written in metaphor reflective of the knowledge of the times.
Darrow then reminded Bryan that God didn’t stop the sun, as the sun didn't move at all. Bryan was forced to concede this point as well. That said he won the trial given the mind of the times. Metaphor and entropy are strange bedfellows as it is difficult to move people off their cherished beliefs.
* * *
Since 1969 when I left Nalco after experiencing apartheid in South Africa, I have been a lay student of religion. BB can attest that I have a sizable library on religion, including that of Freud, whom I put in the same proselytizing category, as he hitched a ride on science and developed a philosophy of the mind as he saw it, and came up with psychotherapy.
* * *
I returned to the university for six years after South Africa, and studied psychology, sociology, and methodology within these curriculums while learning about evolutionary theory mainly through the books and articles (Nature) of Stephen Jay Gould.
If you can imagine, I subjected BB to nine hours of unabridged tapes of "Full House" by Gould one summer as we drove to Minnesota. The narrator was Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and Gould's tapes covered Plato to Darwin.
* * *
Science has unraveled laws of nature and we have invented laws of society and culture often inconsistent with nature. We have done so believing it necessary to support our survival in opposition rather in concert with nature. Times change but societal laws persist beyond their usefulness. You address this in D4P. I wish you well.
Media people put "experts" on television, which is the main source of most people's information, that and the Internet. Experts are asked to comment on these social-cultural aberrancy, and what they say is then taken as gospel.
Experts are believed to know when they actually don't, but think they do, and sometimes are quite convincing in their delivery. I’m thinking of “Dr. Phil,” for example.
It is the same in most other fields of expertise, including science, when science wanders off its fulcrum into the arts, philosophy, and behavior. For example, economics is all about behavior. Experts can even win Nobel Prizes for economics and still get it wrong. No discipline uses science more rigorously than economics, and yet economics has driven us to the brink of absolute entropy time and time again.
On the other hand, and there is always an "on the other hand," these are our guides who take us through the forest of shadows into the partial light of day. I say partial light because what we see is not actually there. It is only what our consciousness allows us to think we see.
* * *
Forty years ago, I wrote about this phenomenon rather poetically before I read Antonio Damasio on consciousness. I discovered I knew what I thought I didn’t know. It was captured in a novel never published titled “The Triple Fool.” At the time, I was disillusioned with the anchors society had provided me, including religion, and, yes, the anchors of my upbringing in a culture that lied to me as well as to itself, and got away with it, or did it?
In many ways, I felt that since 1969 I have been sleep walking through life fighting to find consciousness, or enough of it to purchase some meaning. My wonder is if Clarence Darrow felt this as he saw the powerful forces of unreason taking hold and control of the world he was leaving, a world I was about to enter, a world that continues to come apart at the seams.
Here is what Darrow wrote in his 1932 autobiography:
"The number of people on the borderline of insanity in a big country is simply appalling. These people seem especially addicted to believing themselves saviors and prophets. It takes only a slight stimulus to throw them entirely off balance."
So, you see D4P, far removed from the problems of engineers and their litigates, has become a document of knowing without knowing, or venturing into the complexity that we call "society," with all its synthetic constructs, constructs that are no longer serving us, and like Darrow with Bryan, cut off at the pass by believers who are willing to die for metaphors.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 16, 2010
* * *
REFERENCE:
Author William L. Livingston IV of DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010) sent me an interesting missive that he had created independent of the maturations of my own thoughts, as I was about to walk. Remodeling his domain resulted in cutting him off from his tool kit, but not from his mind.
The mind is an interesting playground that bubbles up new and sometimes tantalizing thoughts when frustrated, blocked from access to our comfort zone, or failure to make meaningful connection. That is my problem not necessary my author friend’s.
Since I am not inside his head, nor privy to his mind, my only clue is what he shares with me in spontaneous moments where the mind as playground doesn’t attempt to create meaningful algorithms, but finds a way for the bubbles to escape their cultural prison only to burst quickly as bubbles do. Consequently, we’re always thinking in remnants. It is good for the soul to recognize and accept this limitation of mind because it allows the mind to go somewhere from nowhere and happily forward in contradiction. The Holy Grail is zero entropy, which requires a climb out of our limitations whatever they may be.
* * *
AUTHOR LIVINGSTON WRITES:
Revisiting my old haunts with the new cognitive framework has been quite a jolt. Stuff I didn't question at the time now jumps out at me as either profound or logically defective. It shows me how close one can be to "enlightenment" and remain stuck in miserable mode. Almost there is nowhere.
An example of benchmarking with the DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (D4P), below, has taken several items usually handled as separate attributes and fused them together. What's interesting is that when I feed back my redo to the original sources, the response is silence. The killer, I believe, is Turing's thesis about intelligence. When it comes to "meanings" about such things, I am far worse than random chance. Outsource to Fisher (He is referring to me and my natural inclination to be random).
The original, by a noted philosopher, was about self-organizing systems. The parts that fit were very good. The parts that missed, missed by light-years.
Self-organization is exhibited in some recursion processes where effective goal-seeking activity occurs without planning or a central authority. Self-organization derives from local interaction of the elements comprising the system and it is always spontaneous. Interaction of elements is both parallel and distributed, depending on the disturbance. For some events, all elements act at the same time. For others, they don’t. With no element a coordinator/manager, each element is autonomous.
Since institutions cannot be self-organizing, operational command and control for organizing to purpose comes at extra cost. Organization imposed cannot solve problems that require intelligence building. Impressing the institutional ideology (infallible) on the troops to support command and control is intolerant of the autonomy intrinsic to effective goal seeking. Recursion and repetition comprise a joint restriction writ large.
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
William,
I was preparing for my daily walk, and I was thinking of many things, then Clarence Darrow slipped into my consciousness. Maybe you and I are telepathic. We humans have been essentially the same for thousands of years. Could we be evolving? I say this not because of instinct or motivation, but necessity. The writing is on the wall, and I sense Darrow got a glimpse of it.
In any case, I tend to think in letterhead themes such as this: "What we think we know, we don't, and what we don't know, we do." Immediately, I thought of writing a piece about it with a lead in with Darrow. But BB would not be happy, as I must ready my novel for publication.
My readers are an eclectic group, wise, energetic, knowledgeable, successful, and creatures of the system, victims of institutions, smothered in paradigms and puzzles of complexity that you present and attempt to unravel in D4P to lower our entropy.
* * *
WHO REMEMBERS A BOOK TITLED “THE WORKER, ALONE” (1995)?
There are many ways to postpone the inevitable, to slow down the rush to oblivion, to bring some sense into the nonsense of the prevailing narrative, to take a stand even if it is on a collapsing cardboard box. I guess that would describe my effort and me.
My latest career has been in organizational development (OD), which is all about self-organizing. I failed to get readers attention with “The Worker, Alone,” although, I think you will agree, these prescient quotations have not withered in provocative freshness. I share them with you as caveat to your quest for getting somewhere in nowhere land:
(1) “Most workers drift into their occupations, many others feel pushed into unwanted careers. Few consider what the job means to them. To derive satisfaction from a job, the worker must be interested in the work. Too many treat work as a prison and find comfort in the victim complex, as if to say, I have no control over my destiny. These workers become bitter, perhaps even hostile in their relationships in the workplace, as they feel trapped. But who is to blame?”
(2) “Workers see economic parity as their birthright. It has never happened before, and it is unlikely to happen in the future. The proportionate distribution of wealth has not changed dramatically since the seventeenth century.”
(3) “Workers insist in the belief that they live in a classless society. Workers cannot accept that the boom is over. Meanwhile, politicians exploit this ambivalence. Both political parties assure workers that the boom is not over. Both sound the same; the rhetoric is the same, the assumptions identical. The common good, upon which the Republic was founded, now a radical idea, is missing, replaced in both parties by majority interest. Polling controls the mind of the time.”
(4) “Democracy loves mediocrity, but abhors, in equal measure, brilliance, idiosyncrasy, genius, or curmudgeons of any kind. Film action heroes, athletes and murderers compete for this worker’s limited attention span. The media give these superstars more exposure in twenty four hours than an iconoclastic Richard Feynman or cerebral Isaiah Berlin receive in a lifetime.”
(5) “For the past quarter century, we have had a bombardment of ideas on how to manage change. Actually, change in the workplace is on only secondary importance. Change will come about naturally, over time, once workers and managers bring about change in themselves. Order comes from within. To establish order takes more than good intentions, more than a change in attitude. Order requires a radical change in mentality, a structural change in the way workers and managers minds view the world. Order requires the individual going against the grain.”
That was 1995, thirteen years before the economic meltdown in 2008. Clearly, what we think we know, we don’t.
My sense is the only way we can change this is to somehow make connection with what we think we don’t know, but do. Meanwhile, entropy is a gaining on us.
* * *
WHAT PEOPLE WANT
People don’t want you to mess with their minds. They want to believe the myths of their religion that have been programmed into them; the myths of their culture and its singular place in the firmament; the myths of their heroes as their being strong, focused, confident and true and not weak, lost, confused and dissembling as they are. The list could go on for pages.
What people want and what they know is what they refuse to think they know, and that is that the myth parade is a charade, a collage of worn out ideas that are stubbornly maintained for how else can they go forward without thinking? .
Civilizations as well as individuals have cognitive biases, and they have evolved over time into truisms, or some kind of ism.
You are taking measure of entropy by fighting reality with D4P, and people – engineers as well as others – are caught up in the chaos of complexity not only of change but in the persistence of these myths that now serve them so poorly.
* * *
Few books have disturbed me (as that is the correct word) as much as D4P. It is a radical document that blasts through the safety net of our cognitive dissonance to leave nowhere land for somewhere land, a place we’ve never been before, and are therefore afraid to go.
No one knows better than you that for an idea to take hold it must have some remnants of that idea already in place. My wonder is if there is enough there to make it so. I certainly want to think it is so.
For that to happen, I believe, and I think you are attempting to do this, readers must discover that what they think they don’t know, they do. Your book will cause pain and discomfort for those who prefer not to think at all but only to believe what they have been programmed to believe, and to think everything will be all right in the end. It won’t.
* * *
I have not read MARK TWAIN's autobiography, but he comes to mind. Twain was a freethinker and had a very dark side to his mind, a side that he didn’t want exposed until he was dead for one hundred years, which happens to be 2010. His reputation is secure but his concerns about religion, institutions, ideologies and human intransigence are closer I suspect to your ideas – if extracts I have read are any example. You, unfortunately, are without a one hundred year cushion.
* * *
CLARENCE DARROW, DARWIN, AND EVOLUTION AS EPILOGUE
William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes "monkey trial" still clung to the belief that the whale swallowed Jonah and regurgitated him, as he believed all the miracles of the Bible.
Darrow asked Bryan if God commanded the sun to stand still so that Joshua and the Israelites could avoid the slaughter, as the Bible says, or did Bryan believe the sun moved around the earth as people believed in biblical times?
Bryan was forced to believe the earth moved around the sun, forcing him to acknowledge much of the bible is written in metaphor reflective of the knowledge of the times.
Darrow then reminded Bryan that God didn’t stop the sun, as the sun didn't move at all. Bryan was forced to concede this point as well. That said he won the trial given the mind of the times. Metaphor and entropy are strange bedfellows as it is difficult to move people off their cherished beliefs.
* * *
Since 1969 when I left Nalco after experiencing apartheid in South Africa, I have been a lay student of religion. BB can attest that I have a sizable library on religion, including that of Freud, whom I put in the same proselytizing category, as he hitched a ride on science and developed a philosophy of the mind as he saw it, and came up with psychotherapy.
* * *
I returned to the university for six years after South Africa, and studied psychology, sociology, and methodology within these curriculums while learning about evolutionary theory mainly through the books and articles (Nature) of Stephen Jay Gould.
If you can imagine, I subjected BB to nine hours of unabridged tapes of "Full House" by Gould one summer as we drove to Minnesota. The narrator was Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and Gould's tapes covered Plato to Darwin.
* * *
Science has unraveled laws of nature and we have invented laws of society and culture often inconsistent with nature. We have done so believing it necessary to support our survival in opposition rather in concert with nature. Times change but societal laws persist beyond their usefulness. You address this in D4P. I wish you well.
Media people put "experts" on television, which is the main source of most people's information, that and the Internet. Experts are asked to comment on these social-cultural aberrancy, and what they say is then taken as gospel.
Experts are believed to know when they actually don't, but think they do, and sometimes are quite convincing in their delivery. I’m thinking of “Dr. Phil,” for example.
It is the same in most other fields of expertise, including science, when science wanders off its fulcrum into the arts, philosophy, and behavior. For example, economics is all about behavior. Experts can even win Nobel Prizes for economics and still get it wrong. No discipline uses science more rigorously than economics, and yet economics has driven us to the brink of absolute entropy time and time again.
On the other hand, and there is always an "on the other hand," these are our guides who take us through the forest of shadows into the partial light of day. I say partial light because what we see is not actually there. It is only what our consciousness allows us to think we see.
* * *
Forty years ago, I wrote about this phenomenon rather poetically before I read Antonio Damasio on consciousness. I discovered I knew what I thought I didn’t know. It was captured in a novel never published titled “The Triple Fool.” At the time, I was disillusioned with the anchors society had provided me, including religion, and, yes, the anchors of my upbringing in a culture that lied to me as well as to itself, and got away with it, or did it?
In many ways, I felt that since 1969 I have been sleep walking through life fighting to find consciousness, or enough of it to purchase some meaning. My wonder is if Clarence Darrow felt this as he saw the powerful forces of unreason taking hold and control of the world he was leaving, a world I was about to enter, a world that continues to come apart at the seams.
Here is what Darrow wrote in his 1932 autobiography:
"The number of people on the borderline of insanity in a big country is simply appalling. These people seem especially addicted to believing themselves saviors and prophets. It takes only a slight stimulus to throw them entirely off balance."
So, you see D4P, far removed from the problems of engineers and their litigates, has become a document of knowing without knowing, or venturing into the complexity that we call "society," with all its synthetic constructs, constructs that are no longer serving us, and like Darrow with Bryan, cut off at the pass by believers who are willing to die for metaphors.
Be always well,
Jim
Saturday, November 13, 2010
PUTTING THE HORSE IN FRONT OF THE CART -- TWENTY-FIRST CHALLENGE FOR THE ENGINEER AND AMERICAN SOCIETY
PUTTING THE HORSE IN FRONT OF THE CART -- THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY CHALLENGE FOR THE ENGINEER AND AMERICAN SOCIETY
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 13, 2010
* * *
AUTHOR WILLIAM L. LIVINGSTON IV WRITES:
Every now and then you run into a word that gets you as a tar baby. I know it's another L* insult to the engineering cranium, but the word chreod is gaining currency in my dotage.
A dude named Waddington invented this word from two Greek words in 1940. Unfortunately the two words have multiple Greek words, which approximate the same thing.
My neighbor is Greek, so I asked him how to pronounce the word, since nowhere on google world does it clue you. The answer is an H sound where you breathe hard out while pronouncing it. The C is essentially silent. Don't worry nobody else knows how to pronounce it either, including the Greeks.
The D4P if anything is a chreod for prevention. Chreod adds "necessary" to methodology.
Chreod is married to homeorhesis. It is the necessary pathway (chreod) that D4P returns to when disturbed. It is recursion not repetition.
It turns out chreod is somewhat popular in other disciplines, like medicine, certainly not systems engineering.
Knowing who my audience “is not” has been a liberating milestone. Use the best-fitting words you can find.
_____________________
My daughter's family visited recently. Their two kids suck on telephone/internet gizmos at every opportunity when the parents are not engaging them directly. I kept getting on their case - total failure. Last night I attended a wake for one of my spouse's patients who died at 50. There were about 75 young ones there from the family. I observed the same behavior as my grandkids. They mistreat each other with microsecond attention spans and diversion to their electronic marvel. Have you noticed the same phenomenon in your world?
Bill
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
William,
Portmanteau, indeed.
In 1924, a year before he squared off against Clarence Darrow in the Scopes "monkey trial," William Jennings Bryan warned that a "scientific soviet is attempting to dictate what shall be taught in our schools, and, in doing so, is attempting to mold the religion of the nation." We all have traveling baggage, individually, professionally, and we seem to cling to it culturally.
* * *
I have come to the conclusion that intellectually we crawl forward on all fours rather than stand upright and face the future. Perhaps it is because the baggage is so heavy.
The terrible WWI was behind our nation and the world when Bryan uttered these words. People looked about and came to blame science with its terrible weapons of warfare that killed and maimed millions and led to other subhuman atrocities. The antidote was a return to old style religion.
High school teacher Scopes was teaching Darwinian evolutionary theory of natural selection which led to the “monkey trial,” which Bryan won but science to this day has tectonically moved forward despite religious opposition.
We believe what we want to believe despite the evidence to the contrary, and when we are opposed fear raises its ugly head.
With fear, there is always a figment of truth for it to take tentative hold, and such was the state of the nation at the time science and Darwinian evolution clashed those many years ago, and so it remains to this day.
You wrote DESIGN FOR PREVENTION not as a threat to religion, but as an expository rendition of the problems and perturbations to engineers literally designing to prevent disasters.
D4P was written before the explosion off the coast of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, a testament to the reality of engineering in the workplace, along with a dissertation on the traveling baggage that prevents engineers and engineering from moving forward.
The oilrig explosion recycled the fears of what oil pollution can and will do to the fragile ecological environment, but also to jobs and the economy of the region in terms of fishing and tourism.
Fear of running out of the staple, oil, that keeps our economic and societal engine running, given the international climate, has made a mockery of good intentions. While many are crying “foul,” there is no innocence here on any side of the disaster, and I mean any side. The oilrig explosion could have been prevented if there had been the will, the way, and the umbrage to step out of the shadows and rise off the mat. No one did.
* * *
D4P is not written in Greek, but in comprehensible prose that reminds us that we are in a shipwreck status. We are in this state because of the way we think, relate to each other, and behave.
"Chreod is married to homeorhesis," you say, which is incomprehensible at first sight because it is unfamiliar language.
Looking up the word, “homeorhesis,” which is not in my dictionary, but on google, and in association with "recursion,” it makes perfect sense.
D4P is an evolving document to alert the engineer, indeed, us all to our deplorable situation and the factors contributing to the state of dysfunction and the recursion, not repetition necessary to make us stand upright and move in a trajectory forward.
D4P is not meant as a definitive document but as the launching pad to soar with the momentum that will marry engineering to a functional future. It is not the case today.
* * *
If I may use a religious analogy, the D4P audience is not doctrinaire engineers, per se, who assume the religion of their discipline is the unvarnished truth, and who have not the will, the way, or the stomach to engage and soar beyond abstractions outside the discipline. D4P addresses the problems of culture, institutional and management infallibility, and anachronistic thinking. These are outside the discipline but still importantly if tangentially related to engineering.
"Chreod is married to homeorhesis," which is a problem for engineers because they have been programmed to crawl before authority, always paid a $ dollar more an hour than they can afford to take an upright stand.
* * *
In retrospect, engineers on the oilrig could point out to the shoddy preventative maintenance, and many engineers have done just that. A theme echoes through their comments that they knew for weeks that something had to give, but what did they do? They did nothing.
Chreod, as you say, adds "necessary" to methodology, which is the premise of D4P. It would mean for those on the oilrig to have taken a stand, mutiny if necessary, to see that the rig was as secure as science and engineering could provide, which didn't happen.
* * *
D4P is an important book. It is the distillate of a passionate career of identity with and caring for the discipline of engineering, its practitioners, and its importance to society.
* * *
I hate to say it, but your audience is not engineers. Your audience is people that engage engineers in the business of engineering. It is professionals in such disciplines tangential to engineering, such as organizational development, people who have had long careers observing and watching leadership, management and organizational life deteriorate into a synthetic phenomenon of regressive consequence.
* * *
It is strange how little I have heard back from engineers. You have attempted to address then in the cadence and language with which they are familiar. Your book challenges them, as it does us all, and we're not interested in being challenged. Shadows and ghosts that cannot be defined in words, but are approaching us from all sides, threatening our society, our nation, and our place in the world, and what do we do?
We do what your daughter's family does. What they did at the wake. We escape into electronic contraptions.
* * *
I was telling BB only today that President Obama is criticized from all sides, as people fail to realize anyone in that office would be chopped liver.
You see I've come to understand -- that is why D4P resonates with me -- that corporations aren't the answer, CEOs aren’t the answer, management is not the answer, but the engineering community at large is the only answer.
Change must evolve from the bowls of the engineering community from the lowest technician to the highest-flying engineer for real change, your "chreod" to occur.
It is the same for the nation. Everyone is worried about Congressional slashing of benefits, entitlement, and other government concessions, especially as they relate to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, and earmarks.
American voters voted out a bunch and voted in another bunch in the mid-term elections. Americans now expect miraculous change without sacrifice without any pain or discomfort on their part, and Congress goes along with this thinking. Congress will retreat into gridlock and blame “it” for doing nothing.
Nothing will change until people across the nation bite the bullet, take the pain, downsize their demands, and recognize they are in charge. Congress reacts to its constituency. Congress has no stomach or capacity to do anything much less the right thing without the support of the people.
Similarly, engineers as a body, and you have given them the text with D4P, to say to all their employers that this is where the rubber hits the road, and if you don't listen to us to our demands for D4P then try to get somewhere without wheels.
Am I encouraged that engineers will rise to the occasion? I have no choice but to believe that is a possibility because I don't want to see engineering or this nation implode.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 13, 2010
* * *
AUTHOR WILLIAM L. LIVINGSTON IV WRITES:
Every now and then you run into a word that gets you as a tar baby. I know it's another L* insult to the engineering cranium, but the word chreod is gaining currency in my dotage.
A dude named Waddington invented this word from two Greek words in 1940. Unfortunately the two words have multiple Greek words, which approximate the same thing.
My neighbor is Greek, so I asked him how to pronounce the word, since nowhere on google world does it clue you. The answer is an H sound where you breathe hard out while pronouncing it. The C is essentially silent. Don't worry nobody else knows how to pronounce it either, including the Greeks.
The D4P if anything is a chreod for prevention. Chreod adds "necessary" to methodology.
Chreod is married to homeorhesis. It is the necessary pathway (chreod) that D4P returns to when disturbed. It is recursion not repetition.
It turns out chreod is somewhat popular in other disciplines, like medicine, certainly not systems engineering.
Knowing who my audience “is not” has been a liberating milestone. Use the best-fitting words you can find.
_____________________
My daughter's family visited recently. Their two kids suck on telephone/internet gizmos at every opportunity when the parents are not engaging them directly. I kept getting on their case - total failure. Last night I attended a wake for one of my spouse's patients who died at 50. There were about 75 young ones there from the family. I observed the same behavior as my grandkids. They mistreat each other with microsecond attention spans and diversion to their electronic marvel. Have you noticed the same phenomenon in your world?
Bill
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
William,
Portmanteau, indeed.
In 1924, a year before he squared off against Clarence Darrow in the Scopes "monkey trial," William Jennings Bryan warned that a "scientific soviet is attempting to dictate what shall be taught in our schools, and, in doing so, is attempting to mold the religion of the nation." We all have traveling baggage, individually, professionally, and we seem to cling to it culturally.
* * *
I have come to the conclusion that intellectually we crawl forward on all fours rather than stand upright and face the future. Perhaps it is because the baggage is so heavy.
The terrible WWI was behind our nation and the world when Bryan uttered these words. People looked about and came to blame science with its terrible weapons of warfare that killed and maimed millions and led to other subhuman atrocities. The antidote was a return to old style religion.
High school teacher Scopes was teaching Darwinian evolutionary theory of natural selection which led to the “monkey trial,” which Bryan won but science to this day has tectonically moved forward despite religious opposition.
We believe what we want to believe despite the evidence to the contrary, and when we are opposed fear raises its ugly head.
With fear, there is always a figment of truth for it to take tentative hold, and such was the state of the nation at the time science and Darwinian evolution clashed those many years ago, and so it remains to this day.
You wrote DESIGN FOR PREVENTION not as a threat to religion, but as an expository rendition of the problems and perturbations to engineers literally designing to prevent disasters.
D4P was written before the explosion off the coast of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, a testament to the reality of engineering in the workplace, along with a dissertation on the traveling baggage that prevents engineers and engineering from moving forward.
The oilrig explosion recycled the fears of what oil pollution can and will do to the fragile ecological environment, but also to jobs and the economy of the region in terms of fishing and tourism.
Fear of running out of the staple, oil, that keeps our economic and societal engine running, given the international climate, has made a mockery of good intentions. While many are crying “foul,” there is no innocence here on any side of the disaster, and I mean any side. The oilrig explosion could have been prevented if there had been the will, the way, and the umbrage to step out of the shadows and rise off the mat. No one did.
* * *
D4P is not written in Greek, but in comprehensible prose that reminds us that we are in a shipwreck status. We are in this state because of the way we think, relate to each other, and behave.
"Chreod is married to homeorhesis," you say, which is incomprehensible at first sight because it is unfamiliar language.
Looking up the word, “homeorhesis,” which is not in my dictionary, but on google, and in association with "recursion,” it makes perfect sense.
D4P is an evolving document to alert the engineer, indeed, us all to our deplorable situation and the factors contributing to the state of dysfunction and the recursion, not repetition necessary to make us stand upright and move in a trajectory forward.
D4P is not meant as a definitive document but as the launching pad to soar with the momentum that will marry engineering to a functional future. It is not the case today.
* * *
If I may use a religious analogy, the D4P audience is not doctrinaire engineers, per se, who assume the religion of their discipline is the unvarnished truth, and who have not the will, the way, or the stomach to engage and soar beyond abstractions outside the discipline. D4P addresses the problems of culture, institutional and management infallibility, and anachronistic thinking. These are outside the discipline but still importantly if tangentially related to engineering.
"Chreod is married to homeorhesis," which is a problem for engineers because they have been programmed to crawl before authority, always paid a $ dollar more an hour than they can afford to take an upright stand.
* * *
In retrospect, engineers on the oilrig could point out to the shoddy preventative maintenance, and many engineers have done just that. A theme echoes through their comments that they knew for weeks that something had to give, but what did they do? They did nothing.
Chreod, as you say, adds "necessary" to methodology, which is the premise of D4P. It would mean for those on the oilrig to have taken a stand, mutiny if necessary, to see that the rig was as secure as science and engineering could provide, which didn't happen.
* * *
D4P is an important book. It is the distillate of a passionate career of identity with and caring for the discipline of engineering, its practitioners, and its importance to society.
* * *
I hate to say it, but your audience is not engineers. Your audience is people that engage engineers in the business of engineering. It is professionals in such disciplines tangential to engineering, such as organizational development, people who have had long careers observing and watching leadership, management and organizational life deteriorate into a synthetic phenomenon of regressive consequence.
* * *
It is strange how little I have heard back from engineers. You have attempted to address then in the cadence and language with which they are familiar. Your book challenges them, as it does us all, and we're not interested in being challenged. Shadows and ghosts that cannot be defined in words, but are approaching us from all sides, threatening our society, our nation, and our place in the world, and what do we do?
We do what your daughter's family does. What they did at the wake. We escape into electronic contraptions.
* * *
I was telling BB only today that President Obama is criticized from all sides, as people fail to realize anyone in that office would be chopped liver.
You see I've come to understand -- that is why D4P resonates with me -- that corporations aren't the answer, CEOs aren’t the answer, management is not the answer, but the engineering community at large is the only answer.
Change must evolve from the bowls of the engineering community from the lowest technician to the highest-flying engineer for real change, your "chreod" to occur.
It is the same for the nation. Everyone is worried about Congressional slashing of benefits, entitlement, and other government concessions, especially as they relate to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, and earmarks.
American voters voted out a bunch and voted in another bunch in the mid-term elections. Americans now expect miraculous change without sacrifice without any pain or discomfort on their part, and Congress goes along with this thinking. Congress will retreat into gridlock and blame “it” for doing nothing.
Nothing will change until people across the nation bite the bullet, take the pain, downsize their demands, and recognize they are in charge. Congress reacts to its constituency. Congress has no stomach or capacity to do anything much less the right thing without the support of the people.
Similarly, engineers as a body, and you have given them the text with D4P, to say to all their employers that this is where the rubber hits the road, and if you don't listen to us to our demands for D4P then try to get somewhere without wheels.
Am I encouraged that engineers will rise to the occasion? I have no choice but to believe that is a possibility because I don't want to see engineering or this nation implode.
* * *
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