James Raymond Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 20, 2010
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REFERENCE:
A “letter to the editor” of Time magazine reads:
“I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg is a fine young man. But to make him "Man of the Year" in celebration of the Flippant Generation of some 50 million that narcissistically publishes a thousand pictures on Facebook in a self-adoration gallery is a bit much.
"Consider this self-indulgence against the fact that at least 3 billion people in the world with yearly incomes of less than $1,000 are likely to be ruled and exploited by tyrants and lack fresh drinking water, adequate sanitation and housing, and sufficient nutrition to keep body and soul together. It is as if Time lives in the same bubble as this generation, and feels a need to reinforce it. Sad, but I suppose inevitable given the priorities of our culture.”
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It is not a surprise that popular Facebook should generate so many comments. What is a surprise is that people who use it are so apologetic for the attention. The exchange follows represents a running conversation I have with Michael. I hope it is of some use to you.
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A READER WRITES:
Hello Jim,
You have such a wonderful ability to summarize inanity. The "self-adoration gallery" is such an appropriate phrase. It almost makes me ashamed to have a Facebook page with "friends" post dramatic occurrences in their lives.
Some of my favorites include, "Leaving White Castle with a sack of burgers." The one that made me stop visiting the site several months ago was, " I've been on Facebook all day. Signing off to walk my dogs."
Still, you answer the inevitable question, "Why Zuckerberg?" Time chooses its person of the year based on influence. The fact that Zuckerberg has, intentionally or not, become a tool of the elitist rich who prefer that we be distracted away from concerns over the abused, homeless and hungry people of the world (and in our own country) is most relevant to the recognition.
His phenomena extend beyond our borders, distracting most of the wired world.
The Internet, which exposed people around the world to concepts like freedom of speech and democracy, was becoming a tool far too dangerous to the power structure. Zuckerberg has alleviated some of their fears. Julian Assange, on the other hand, has heightened them. He has made us realize the elite engage in petty sniping, however at a greater expense. What a surprise the super rich Saudis are threatened by Iran's burgeoning nuclear capability. Okay, I'm going to walk my dog over to White Castle and grab a couple of sliders.
Michael
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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Michael,
First of all, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
I know 2009 - 2010 were rough years, but you kept your wits about you because you have a wonderful mind and a fine love of family and community. With that anchor, you are blessed.
As always, your candor and ability to capture the essence of what I'm trying to say are apparent.
Many correspond with me, people who have been blessed with much and have had much taken away from them in the past two years, or since the economic downturn. They caution me not to mention their names as they have their pride. But I fear they fail to see their plight has something to do with making poor choices. As you point out, there is no socio-economic class immune to the dominant culture and those pulling the strings.
People write who you could say were once rich, earning more than $ million a year, wealth that has disappeared. The irony is there is an up side to this upside down situation. They are living in estates virtually "free" because banks don’t want to eat their debt, and are waiting for an upsurge in real estate value before foreclosing.
At this time of year, my heart goes out to them. They didn't see this coming, continued to live as if they would always be rich, continued to make poor choices.
They are not bad people but believed in the nonsense of our culture. It reminds me of the television program, "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous." It was popular during the 1980s and 1990s. People imitated these lifestyles, and builders obligingly built mock houses that resembled their fantasies. Now we have "American Idols" where literally tens of thousands stand in line forever to be interviewed for selection to the first of several rounds before actually getting a chance to appear on television. Young people dress, talk, walk and mimic their idols.
It could be argued whether this is a matter of making poor choices or having a poor perspective on what it is to live a worthwhile life in the confines of self-identity, self-reliance, self-direction and, yes, self-determination.
* * *
Last night I watched PBSTV Masterpiece Contemporary’s "Endgame." The title is a metaphor from chess to describe the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid in South Africa.
South Africa changed my life. I ran smack into the wall of apartheid in 1968 with its social injustice. What made it more painful is that I had such respect for Afrikaners who had a history similar to American pioneers. I found Afrikaners very much like Iowans. Yet, they had established this terrible system with draconian perfection.
The Afrikaner government had only been in power for twenty years in 1968, and already there had been terrible encounters with the African National Congress (ANC) led by Nelson Mandela who was now in prison.
I was a young American executive treated as if I was somebody in a style well beyond what I could have imagined in my wildest dreams. Yet, I had the legacy of the memory of my da, who said, "the day, Jimmy, you forget you are the son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad is the day you won't know who the hell you are, and they'll have you for lunch." I never forgot, never bought into the hype, and luckily had that anchor that kept me sane.
That said you could say it was my first reality check. I could see how the world of freedom and democracy could be skewed to exclude, indeed, to outlaw the majority population, which was black, and to impose minority rule with an iron hand, which was white. Imagine if you can, there were 14 million Bantu (blacks), 2 million Colored, and 4 million whites of which only 2.5 million were Afrikaners and 1.5 million Brits.
My job was to facilitate the creation of a new company to virtually eliminate competition in our specialty chemical business. It meant cooperating with the political regime because South Africa was a powder keg and could blow up at any time into civil war.
Against this reality, I was obliged to live like an aristocrat to ply my skills. I did it pretty naively until I saw SOWETO, the South West African township where more than a million Bantu lived taking the train into Johannesburg daily with passbooks in hand to work for whites, including me. It was a shock to learn that they could go to jail without charge for 120 days if stopped by police with a delinquent passbook.
The "Endgame" gave viewers a sense of the dramatic release of Nelson Mandela after 27 years in prison in 1990. Majority rule was established a few years later thus avoiding a civil war.
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To put my concern for "Person of the Year" in another context, here in Tampa we have 15,000 homeless on the streets in a county population of 1.2 million.
If that is not bad enough, the city council wants to impose strict rules about panhandling using the rationale that these "drifters" are dregs of society mentally ill, or victims of drug abuse, alcoholism, or crime. In the Sunday edition of the St. Petersburg Times mug shots of three were in the newspaper referencing their criminal past. Literally millions are homeless across our bountiful land, millions more go to bed hungry.
While we can go to the moon, we cannot seem able to solve this problem.
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Human kind is a strange breed. There is an NYU professor in photography that has had a camera installed in the back of his head, a very painful process, so that he can study what is going on around him and write a paper on it. The only problem the university administration of NYU has ordered him to wear a cap all the time he is on campus because of the intrusiveness of his research. He was interviewed on National Public Radio.
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Several people have written to me that Hitler and Stalin were "Men of the Year" for Time. As you point out, the justification was the power of their influence. Together, Hitler and Stalin caused the death of some ten million Jews by estimates I have seen, and more than one hundred million people. We have had modern versions of them in the Balkans and Africa, but not the same distinction. Some of these recent despots have ended up at The Hague for war crimes. Society never got a chance at Hitler, and Stalin became America's great ally in WWII, and then great enemy during the Cold War.
Mark Zuckerberg is obviously a bright, gifted and daring young man. What he has created may eventually evolve into something useful to mankind. Remember many inventions started out as toys of distraction such as the typewriter.
There is no point in faulting him for everyone jumping on his bandwagon. It just saddens me that our consciousness fails to be elevated. We drift so easily back to primitive fascinations. That must have occurred when primitives looked into a melted piece of sand that contained silver and saw their image.
In one sense we cannot escape self-fascination, but in another, we cannot afford such limitation to survive.
Our fascination with Facebook tells me we are starving for social connection. Back to “cut and control" philosophy, given our overwhelming dependence on electronics, social networking has been reduced to sharing pictures and mundane happenings, or something better than nothing, but this is not intimacy.
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Michael, I believe you give the elite more credit than it deserves. I see them very much on automatic pilot as surprised as everyone else with how fads have taken over. They are as insular if not more so than Facebook devotees. Reality is hostile territory beyond the sphere of the elite, who dress, dine, talk, think, live and play to the tempo of a metronome.
The elite are economic advisers to the president, number crunchers, who have no idea what it is like to run a business, yet they are middle class business experts. I see this glee club Monday through Friday, on "Charlie Rose." And it is not limited to economic experts.
After a while, the movers and shakers interviewed by Rose all sound the same as if they are talking out of the same voice box. They can be from Iran or Afghanistan, Columbia or Brazil, Canada or New Zealand, Mozambique or Barbados, New York City or San Francisco; close your eyes and you come to think you're listening to a ventriloquist.
There are exceptions. Film star Sean Penn has done important work in Haiti, the Doctors Without Borders, and the people of relief agencies and various religious groups that don't talk about caring but are involved in it daily around the globe to demonstrate their humanity.
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As for the Internet, the reaction of the West (not only the United States) to Julian Assange's WikiLeaks is revealing. We love secrets in an age where there are no secrets anymore.
The traitor, Bill Haydon in John LeCarre's novel, "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" (1974), claims that secret services are “the only real measure of a nation's political health, the only real expression of its subconscious" (p. 342, hardback edition).
I believe the CIA claims the same relevance. Certainly, the agency did during the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Imagine what would happen to Assange if this were 1974. One wonders if he would be extradited to the United States, tried and imprisoned, or even executed. Daniel Ellsberg of the “Pentagon Papers” fame, who recently applauded Assange, faired pretty well for his crime. Both whistle blowers were published in The New York Times, which tends to throw a wrench into such cases after the fact.
If I am not too wide of the mark, we are becoming a little less paranoid and a little more rational. I withhold final judgment until I see how this WikiLeaks thing is settled.
From your comment, you must have seen the published WikiLeaks in New York Times. I agree they are generally mundane, petty, and absurd. This brings me to another dimension of this.
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One of the reasons for my success in OD work was listening to the grapevine. People in the workplace at the bottom of the ladder know the score better than anyone else. Management would do well to listen to its people instead of thinking the walls don’t have ears. Walls do have ears. Workers have always had that advantage. Too often workers play ignorant and go along to get along doing exactly the opposite of what they know is right because management says so, that is, unless OD becomes their collective voice. That has been my experience.
It was how I came to develop my six passive behaviors and three cultures (comfort, complacency, contribution). I believe conservatively that the "SIX SILENT KILLERS" cost American business $50 billion a year while management thinks it is in control and workers retreat into passivity and leave their minds at home. Occasionally, a whistle blower brings this to management’s attention, only to have the messenger killed.
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On the positive side, I see WikiLeaks despite the damage it may cause or has already caused as a wake up call to a society that it has lost its moral viability. We have become drones of a system where the leadership from Congress to the President, from commerce to industry, and from education to entertainment seems to function as if nobody is in charge.
Whenever that has happened in the past, distraction ruled. Distraction rules today.
To illustrate, imagine corruption becomes a norm. If so many companies are doing more or less the same, if everybody is in some dodgy business, and gets tired of painting the same picture of dodginess, the inclination is to suddenly turn corruption into aggressive and perceptive marketing.
Continuing my hypothesis, then people on Wall Street come to create and sell derivatives and build up fortunes from nothing but dodgy instruments, and we come to call them smart or brilliant but never criminal.
There is a psychological phenomenon that advertisers and television executives have mastered that illustrates this more graphically.
A television character such as "Dr. House" or a television commercial becomes something everybody loves to hate. If that is not enough, we have a need to share this hatred with friends or anyone who will listen, until we eventually get tired of hating "Dr. House" or that terrible commercial, and suddenly cannot stop ourselves from being obsessed with watching "Dr. House" or buying what the commercial is advertising. This can get scary when seen in another context.
For example, some might say this is a time when United States no longer appears capable of understanding its own revolution, a time when politics no longer seem relevant to everyday life, a time when economics appear a mathematical game of Nobel Laureates, a time when there seems little will for social justice, a time when new technology opens the floodgates with something like WikiLeaks to the chagrin of those in power.
If the psychological phenomenon I have described takes hold we could be waiting for calamity to demonstrate our resilience and rescue strategy. We are so programmed to such crisis management. That is why I say it is scary.
* * *
When I was thirty-five, which is the mean age of Hillsborough County (Tampa), I didn't have such a perspective. Nor was I inclined to listen to an old foggy like myself. Somehow each generation finds the key to go forward. I don’t think it is an exaggeration that this is a more challenging than mine was. For that reason, I hope it can cut through our malarkey and firm ground.
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BB rolls her eyes as she sees me writing yet another long missive. "Do you think anyone reads that stuff?"
I shake my head. "Some.”
“Not many?”
"No, Probably not.”
She shakes her head, and silently leaves my study.
* * *
Perhaps it is a way for me to stay connected. I've always been more comfortable with my books and ideas than with people, more comfortable deskbound and alone in my study than traveling. Yet my many careers always involved working with people. I've traveled more than a million miles in the course of my work, and I still go to Europe every couple of years. Go figure.
It is always a pleasure to hear from you. I hope you and your family have a wonderful year.
Be always well,
Jim
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