WHEN A PERSON MURDERS SOMEONE, WE ALL DIE A LITTLE, AND OTHER PONDERINGS ON THIS SUNDAY

WHEN A PERSON MURDERS SOMEONE, WE ALL DIE A LITTLE, AND OTHER PONDERINGS THIS SUNDAY

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 30, 2011

*     *     *

MOM ADMITS KILLING KIDS

My expectations, when I came back from South Africa in 1969, were that I wouldn’t make it to the end of the century, and here I am eleven years into the new.  It has given me the opportunity to ponder a world that is having a nervous breakdown that I never expected to see, a world that seemingly has everything and nothing at all.

*     *     *

A well educated mother with a very successful husband, living in an upscale neighborhood here in Tampa, picked up her thirteen year old son from soccer practice drove him home, then shot and killed him. 

She then went upstairs where her honor student sixteen-year-old daughter was studying and shot her in the back of the head.  She lost the courage to make it a murder/suicide. 

The mother is 50, the father is 48, a US Army colonel currently out of the country on assignment in the Middle East. 

The crime of these two young promising teenagers was that of back talking and bad mouthing their mother.  She had had it and lost it.  They lost their lives for this crime.  We have lost the contribution of two young people who were on their way to making meaningful contributions to American society. 

It is the DNA of our times to think this mother is disturbed with some psychobabble description of her sickness, failing to realize the seeds of her sickness are in us all. 

It was not an impulsive act.  The mother planned the killings purchasing a 38-caliber pistol for this precise act.  It was not a happy home as police cars were periodically at the home.  Why she did it only she and God know, or maybe that is not the case.

I don’t know her, or her children, or her husband or actually anything about the family other than what is in the newspaper or on television but I mourn them all. 

Intelligence is not enough to get any of us through this life, especially if it is only cognitive intelligence.  It never was.  It is not easy being a human being.  This life gets more demanding, more ruthless, more punishing every day, mainly, I believe, because we look for guidance outside ourselves, for coping through some outside agency. 

We are still programmed, but not to be self-sufficient, or not to trust our own instincts.  We have lost our spiritual connection with the land, with each other, with our heritage, with our culture, and therefore with ourselves. 

*     *     *

COPS AND COP KILLINGS

For a decade (1970 – 1980), I was a police consultant as an organizational development psychologist, consulting police departments from Connecticut to Miami along the eastern seaboard. 

My studies have been used in course work at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, and the University of North Carolina.  I wrote my master’s thesis and doctor’s dissertation on my empirical work in the field. 

I conducted long-term studies in a number of police departments including Fairfax, Virginia, Raleigh, North, Carolina, Richmond, Virginia, St. Petersburg, Florida, and Miami, Florida.  I have given executive development seminars for senior police officers in Seattle, San Francisco, Denver, Kansas City, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, and Orlando and Tampa, Florida for the American Management Association. 

And I have ridden more than a thousand hours with police officers on the job over the course of this work.  I mention this involvement as prelude to saying I have developed great affection and respect for police, and the job.

There is no profession, in my experience, that sees society as naked as do the police.  Yet, police are made up of ordinary men and women who have a sense of duty and honor to protect and serve the community. 

Police deal in human combustibles every day and of a variety that no priest, rabbi, minister or Moslem cleric, psychologist or psychiatrist is likely to ever encounter. 

My work was with them when many were called “pigs,” abuse which they took and still did their duty.  I have been present when they have been spit upon and thrown up on, pushed and shoved, showers with the most vile language I have ever heard, from both men and women, young people, too, and they showed restrain.  It was often hard to watch.

My wonder is where society would be today without police, without their sense of duty and their capacity to absorb hate, vilification and societal pathology?

Eleven police officers have already been killed this year in the State of Florida, two only a few days ago in St. Petersburg, men in the flower of life, with wives and families.  They were attempting to arrest a felon whose marriage had gone awry.  The felon’s brother is a champion boxer, and a solid citizen. 

*     *     *

As one who has never owned a gun, never gone hunting in his life, only fired a gun during military training when in the US Navy, I look at guns, the gun control lobby, and the whole violence with guns from a rather unique perspective. 

Guns don’t kill.  People who own guns do.  Why do people own guns?  Why do people own assault weapons, weapons that are designed for warfare?  Why do people have a weapon in the glove compartment of their vehicles?  Indeed, why does a jogger carry a gun while jogging?  A jogger recently killed a man while jogging who attempted to rob him here in the Tampa Bay area.

The short answer may be – I say may be because I don’t know – because of fear.  The longer answer is that we have always been a violent society since our earliest days. 

The Pilgrims brought guns to this country to hunt and then fight off the Indians.  The early settlers would feel naked without a weapon.  We have made national heroes of Daniel Boone, and James Fennimore Cooper's fictional gun totters in his Leather Stocking Sagas.  During the "The Age of Jackson," senators and congressmen would feel naked without a weapon during legislative sessions. 

The cartoon, Doonesbury, is currently lampooning Congressmen for carrying guns as if this is unique to the American character, which it is not.    

Chances are we never would have won the American Revolutionary War without the “Minute Men.”  There is one story of that early war in 1777, when it was going bad for the Americans, and General John Burgoyne sent out a company of men to flush out the Americans north of New York City and take prisoners.  Not a single British soldier returned. 

Bearing arms is a right in the American constitution, and having that right or denying that right would be even more insane than was prohibition (18^th amendment) in 1919 and then repealed in 1933 (21^st amendment).  Prohibition gave birth to speak easies and Al Capone.  You cannot legislate morality.  Morality is always in the mind of the time.

It is interesting to report as a non-gun citizen that most of our celebrated belief in individualism has eroded to the point of being nearly totally gone.  The right to bare arms is apparently the last vintage of that individualism that still exists.  

Rather than paying so much attention to guns and gun control, I think it would be time better spent paying attention to the evolution of our American culture.  We are changing.  And with change chronic perturbations need attention.  We might start with why we are so self-hating and how we might rectify this draining predilection.

*     *     *

ARE HUMAN BEINGS BY NATURE THEIVES?

When New Orleans suffered the terrible effects of Hurricane Katrina, my heart went out to the desperate straits of most citizens.  What I wasn’t prepared for was the terrible looting. 

Then I thought of the Riots of Watts, Chicago, and Detroit when ordinary citizens looted the stores in which they shopped as if, given the circumstances, they had a right to loot, or to break the law.

I recent days, I’ve watched the peaceful marches for regime change in Egypt collapse into street riots, burning automobiles, breaking windows, torching commercial and public buildings, and, then most unbelievable of all, looting the Egyptian Museum of cultural artifacts that go back to the beginning of our common civilization. 

Who would do this?  How would students committed to building a better society resort to this cultural carnage?  What gives anyone permission to take their anger out on merchants and officials, who in the main are good and decent people? 

People who devote their lives to public service, contrary to stories on the media, are in the main good and decent individuals.  I wouldn’t want to change places with them in a million years.  But somebody, thank God, is willing to make the sacrifice and endure the abuse that public service entails. 

Remember this, the media don’t sustain themselves on good news.  They don’t sustain themselves on pictures of tranquility and peaceful assembly.  They don’t sustain themselves on people doing the mundane things that Erving Goffman wrote about in “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” (1959).  Media are looking for stories that get our attention, the more the macabre the better, as the public feeds on the sensational aspect of otherwise ordinary existence.  It is part of our appetite for collective insanity.

*     *     *

Are we by nature thieves?  I wonder.  When I was a young executive with a chemical company, we had a meeting of top managers in Chicago.  Each manager at his placemat had a cigarette lighter with a diamond embedded in the casing along with the company’s logo and date of the conference. 

We took a break, and I came back and my lighter was gone.  Everyone knew I didn’t smoke, but my mother did, and I was going to give her the lighter.  I would imagine at the time the lighter was worth about $1,000, ten times that in today’s dollars.  None of those executives were hurting for cash or perks, and no hotel employee took it, as it was stipulated there would be no interruptions. 

One of those top executives was a thief, pure and simple. 

Why?  I don’t know.  I’ve tried to answer it for forty years.  My senses keep being bombarded with the idea that thievery is natural to us, if we think we can get away with it, or justify it – Fisher doesn’t smoke – we steal! 

Material possessions have never meant much to me.  Perhaps it is because I come from so little, I’m not sure.  But our society, indeed, Western civilization more specifically, has made material wealth important, which brings me to my next pondering.

*     *     *

WHERE IS THE CHURCH WHEN WE NEED IT?

Culture always starts with religion, leastwise this is the case of the last thousand years or so.  When we think of culture, we usually think of European culture and the Renaissance.  Islam and Jewish culture were underway long before the Renaissance came.

The origins of science, commerce, poetry, art, and yes, tolerance did not originate with European Christianity. The Moors from Africa, the Muslims, if you well, brought those gifts to Europe in the eighth century. 

The Moors dominated Spain, which was then the seat of learning, for nearly eight hundred years (711 – 1492).  Their dominance ended the same year Columbus discovered America (1492). 

This period was also called “The Golden Age of Jewish Culture in Spain.”  Judaism flourished under Muslim rule, as the Moors were far more tolerant of Jews than Christians.  It was the Christians that established the Spanish Inquisition and persecuted non-Christians or ostracized Jews who would not convert to Christianity.  It is all a matter of our Western history. 

Christianity, both Catholicism and Protestantism, has reason to celebrate its cultural heritage, but it owes a deep debt to Muslim and Jewish cultures, which co-existed rather well for centuries. 

Now, we have Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan and Egypt in a state of turmoil with little Israel right in the middle of this instability with few aware much less interested in a common history that Judaism and Islam once enjoyed during their “golden age.”

Religion, whatever the book that justifies its existence, is a human group.  Religious denominations have all had rocky histories.  And religion, whatever the naysayers may say, such as Christopher Hitchens, have had an important, no, vital role in the history of mankind.  Most people believe in God – all three great religions believe in the same God – because God is a way to get outside oneself to see more clearly what is inside.

*     *     *

Even worshiping the same God has not made life any easier.  We are in a period of transition.

Pitrim Sorokin wrote that this transition would be painful, but inevitable, that religions would lose their way, and as a consequence, so would their followers.  The sociologist wrote these words three-quarters of a century ago:

“We are seemingly between two epochs the dying Sensate culture of our magnificent yesterday, and the coming Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow.  We are living, thinking, and acting at the end of a brilliant six-hundred-year-long Sensate day” (Social and Cultural Dynamics, Volume III, page 535).

This explains why we are so materialistic, so preoccupied with our sexuality, so superfluous in our motivation, and so ambivalent in the choices we make. 

Sorokin predicted we would become increasingly fatalistic, increasingly enamored of fantasies, the fanatical and the transitory, increasingly self-abusing and self-destroying, increasingly skeptical of law and order and social restrain, indeed, increasingly out-of-control and therefore suicidal, homicidal and genocidal.  Like the phoenix, we would rise out of our own self-destruction to a new creativity. 

Wars, he said, would become more devastatingly senseless and monstrous as we fought our way through our dying Sensate to the new Ideational day.

*     *     *

By the accident of my birth, I carry the toxins of this insanity in my genetic code.  When I was a born, I never ate meat on Friday, I went to Mass and Communion every week, I married didn’t practice birth control nor did I believe in divorce.

Likewise, my Jewish friends, whether orthodox or not, married Jews, practiced their faith, kept to the strict code of observing the Sabbath and the diet of the Torah.

Catholics didn’t marry Protestants or Protestants Catholics.  Both Christian faiths, they kept in the main separate from each other.

That has all changed in this period of transition and not necessarily for the worse.  Yet, some aspects of that early training stay with us.  I still don’t believe in abortion, that life begins at conception.  However, I have divorced.  I no longer go to Mass, and I infrequently attend church, and then it is usually a Baptist church, as my wife, Beautiful Betty, prefers that.

My Jewish friends often marry gentiles, who often convert to Judaism, although born Catholic.  On the other hand, I’ve known Jews who have converted to Christianity as well. 

Most Jews I know, even those that do not attend synagogue, observe the Sabbath and the Jewish diet.  Moreover, Jewish respect for knowledge and the diligence required in pursuit of it has not diminished from any Jews I know.

The Protestant work ethic has influenced my own development in high school and at university.  Less apparent is my tolerance for people who differ with my cultural roots.  For example, I have always been surprised at the antipathy towards people of Islam and Judaism, or for minorities for that matter of any ilk.  We’re told that education liberates us from such hatreds and fears, but my parents could hardly be called educated. 

That said I’ve encountered bias against Catholics, sometimes of the most virulent kind, but I never thought to feel hatred or fear when I traveled through or worked in Islamic countries when I was young.  True, I was ignorant of Islam but never thought to see the person I was dealing with as other than a businessman.  Call me naïve but I was attracted to Jewish students in college, but never thought of them as Jewish, but simply the smartest ones in the subject at hand. 

During my Christmas vacations while at university, I would spend a good deal of time at the library.  My mother once asked, “Do you see any of your friends at the library?”  I told her only my Jewish friends, which was true.  I suppose a lot of college students partied during my era on holidays, but I wasn’t so inclined or felt I could afford it, academically. 

*      *     * 

It has been my experience in working across a good part of this world that most people, whatever their cultural programming, are decent and most comfortable living among their own kind without hassles or confrontations. 

Religious leaders once were the messengers of tolerance and understanding but too often today they are possessed with the same toxic fears of ethnic assimilation that terrorist use so effectively to keep us hostage to their sickness and demands.

There was a time I thought I would be a priest, a Jesuit priest, because I had heard Jesuits were given great freedom to study where knowledge took them.  I would imagine had that happened, given my mindset, I would by now have been excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church as a troublemaker. 

Why?  Because I would challenge many of its tenets, including the infallibility authority of the pope, why priests couldn’t marry, why women couldn’t become priests, why homosexual men or women couldn’t become priests, and I would have demanded (I’m good at demanding) that all priests that had abused children be not only removed from the presence of children, but be counseled to redirect their lives to useful pursuits. 

Sickness is sickness, and one type of sickness is not to be esteemed more or less than another.  We are all fallible, weak and needy human beings, all of us.

*     *     *

HUMAN RIGHTS, DICTATORS AND SOCIAL UNREST

Some fifty years ago, when I was working in South America, I made a call on the chief chemist of a bauxite (aluminum) refinery in Jamaica.  He was a black man who had studied at Stanford University where he acquired his Ph.D.  With me was an assistant, that I must admit wasn’t involved in much of the conversation.  As we were driving across Jamaica, he finally cut into the conversation and said, “I can’t believe what terrible conditions these people in.”

The Jamaican chemist turned to him, “Don’t attempt to judge another’s culture by your own standards.  Whatever you think you see, it is a lie.”

That was the end of that discussion, but the comment has stayed with me all these years because I know it to be so true.

*     *     *

The President of the United States, in my view, misuses his bully pulpit and influence by advocating “human rights” as he perceives them to be as American standards.  It would seem that he believes it is innocuous to say, “everyone wants the right to free speech, the right of assembly, and the right to free elections.” 

The problem with such a declaration is that it is better to be worked out through diplomatic channels fully understanding where the country is in terms of stability, and democracy.

It would seem that only spasmodically is our foreign policy prudent in this way.  A nation is no different than an individual.  You can lead the individual to water but you cannot force him to drink, even if it would save his life. 

Remember those crying for democracy have within their midst those people who are looting and stealing and shooting or throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at police.  The unsavory element always seems attracted to chaos.  There are other ways to change.

The Czech “Velvet Revolution” of 1989 was led by the poet Vaclav Havel who was not histrionic or given to pyrotechnics.  He did not seek retribution of the abuses of power of the Communist regime through vengeance, as did Robespierre of the French monarchy in the French Revolution.  Havel led to the establishment of a stable government.  Robespierre gave birth to the Reign of Terror. 

Power has a way of corrupting, and it is unusual when it doesn’t corrupt in regime change. 

The current issue of the Smithsonian (February 2011) has an article on George Washington, “The Reluctant President.” 

After the Revolutionary War, Americans wanted to make him king, and when he refused that they elected him president unanimously (the only time).  They then wanted him to be president for life.  He refused that, too, serving two terms glad to escape back to his home at Mount Vernon.  He set the precedence.

Nelson Mandela set a similar precedence in South Africa.  He avoided Civil War, which people feared when I lived in South Africa in 1968.  He made peace with the government that had instituted the draconian practice of apartheid, which gives some testament to the amazing man that he is.

What Washington, Havel and Mandela have in common is an enter calm, a moral center, a compass that directs their behavior.  They were soldiers of the mind in different ways but they understood retribution or insane vengeance would make of them what they fought to overcome.

*     *     *

The stability of the world depends on the stability of the Middle East.  This cannot be argued.  But imagine if China were today reduced to civil war with its tens of millions, indeed, hundreds of millions of people still living and surviving in a putative nineteenth century existence, what then? 

It is my view, given the situation in China, that the government, which could be called a dictatorship the same as Egypt, would introduce utter chaos should it lose its grip on control. 

Dissidents don’t rule, dissidents disrupt.

Dissidents are driven by dreams, by ideas and ideals that are hypothetical and therefore untried.

Dissidents have no interest, time or inclination to examine their own motives or draconian drives.

Dissidents have no inclination to either suspect or inspect their means, as they believe their ends justify them.

Dissidents see themselves as good and those in power as evil, all issues are black or white, never gray.

Dissidents don’t have the time or the inclination to think of the disruption or the repercussions of the disruption to wholesale chaos, or to the impact on ordinary citizens, citizens who may not have had the advantages they have enjoyed to luxuriate in idealism.

Dissidents believe they know what is best for the majority when they are always in the minority.

*     *     *

We in the West think everyone wants to be American or European, that everyone wants our form of government and to adhere to our ideologies, wants to be Americanized, Europeanized, Westernized, when much of the world would prefer to be left alone. 

This is not a history lesson but much of the damage that now is around Western ears goes back to World War I, and even earlier in the administration of Theodore Roosevelt who decided that America should be an empire.  Well, now we are an Empire in Decline, and are having to deal with that fact.

*     *     *

These are some of the things crossing my mind of a Sunday morning.

*     *     *

IS THIS OUR SPUTNIK MOMENT? AN EXCHANGE OF VIEWS

IS THIS OUR SPUTNIK MOMENT?  AN EXCHANGE BETWEEN A READER AND THE AUTHOR

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 27, 2011

REFERENCE:

This missive was bound to generate immediate response.  It represents an appendage or epilogue to what I published twenty years ago, WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES (1991). 

It was reviewed on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” The Wall Street Journal, Industry Week, and the Business Book Review Journal, among other publications.  The Delta Group Florida published it after a British firm vacillated and then decided not to take the gamble. 

It was decades ahead of its time as events have proven.  And as pointed out in this missive, a series of books were published in the same genre including THE WORKER, ALONE! GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN (1995), SIX SILENT KILLER: MANAGEMENT’S GREATEST CHALLENGE (1998), CORPORATE SIN: LEADERLESS LEADERS & DISSONANT WORKERS (2000), and A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007). 

It is difficult to get the attention of either management or professionals, as the workforce has evolved, but I have tried.  Moreover, it is easy to misconstrue the message of my works in that I don’t see the situation as an either/or proposition, or a zero sum game. 

There are no villains in this scenario, only inept, misinformed, misguided, and entrenched forces on both sides of the equation, that is, labor and management. 

We have reached the point in our history when it is futile and pusillanimous to take sides and to suggest one side is good and the other evil.  Labor needs management and management needs labor.  The irony is that the designations, labor and management, have become essentially meaningless. 

We are in a climate and culture when intellectual property is far more valuable than physical property, when knowledge is not only power but also no longer the domain of either labor or management.  Seemingly, long ago now, Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak of Apple fame embarrassed Xerox and IBM by making their dominance one for the history books. 

Creative thinking is not replacing critical thinking but complementing it, as we are finally realizing that we cannot solve the problems with the same thinking that created them.  Likewise, we cannot stereotype either labor or management as the culprit in this affair, but must attempt to look deeper into the problem, which involves each of us to some extent looking at where we are and how we got there.

This can be a Sputnik moment, as President Barak Obama suggested, or it can mark the end of the American Empire, as certainly as World War Two marked the end of the British Empire.  Anachronistic wars, terrorist plots, and senseless carnage are still with us, but the war raging around the world as never before is the “War of Ideas,” and that war will gain no resolution by pointing fingers.

*     *     *

A READER WRITES:

THE KEY THOUGHT (reference to this missive) IS: WILL GOVERNMENT TAKE CARE OF THE PEOPLE OR WILL IT TAKE CARE OF CORPORATIONS? (Upper case the reader’s)

There is class warfare going on (150 years) and the 2%ers have been winning big time.

Wealth is fine, rich greed is evil.

America groans with violence, poverty, death from lack of health care, wars, and the filthy rich rape our country with the help of politicians.

*     *     *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Just to set the record straight, throughout human history, not just in the last 150 years, more than 90 percent of the wealth was and remains to this day in the hands of 10 percent or less.  Now, why is that?

Books have for generations disputed why and no scholar or set of scholars has reached unanimity as to the “why.”  This has been the case with tribal authorities, monarchies, dictatorships, socialist and communist states, and democratic republics, including the United States of America.

Capitalistic society has made it more transparent if not totally so.  There was a time when the wealthy were less inclined to be so ostentatious about displaying their wealth.  Baseball player Derek Jeter has built a $7 million home here in Tampa, after holding out for a 2011 contract of more than $15 million when his best years in baseball are behind him, because he can. 

Jeter is in this alleged 2 percent of which you refer but because he is an icon of entertainment he is given a pass.  Yet, he doesn’t create jobs, doesn’t create wealth but absorbs it from people often who are the least able to afford such extravagance.  I’ve known people who have purchased NFL season tickets that cost thousands of dollars who otherwise live in relative modest circumstances.  No attention is given this profligate misuse of income, or the creation of icons who often behave in public as if they are a law unto themselves. 

Early in my career, still in my mid-thirties, I was making a living abroad without needing to pay United States taxes close to this upper 2 percent.  Yet, I lived modestly with little sign that I was of such circumstance.  I was not the exception but the rule.  Executives of my early years would find it inconceivable to earn 500 to a thousand times as much as the hourly worker.  That morality ended after World War Two.  Why?

Again, sociologists and psychologists, as well as historians, have taken a stab at explaining this.  Management guru, Peter Drucker, was appalled at this departure from good sense, but even he couldn’t explain it although he tried.

My explanation is somewhat ambivalent.  I think most wealth creators are honest, legitimate, hard working, ethical, and dedicated to the enhancement of this Republic. 

I worked for such a man, and I write about him in my new novel, GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA (not yet published).  It is about my time in South Africa.  Even then in my company the seeds of the evil you describe were apparent.  Some executives would take any advantage they could protected by it being legal rather than worrying about it being ethical. 

I would say they were only ten percent of the members of top management in that company, but they exploited their power.  My boss didn’t, and I hope that I was seen as being of the same character.  So, your point, corporate evil does exists, but I don’t think it is the culprit nor as prevalent as you may believe it to be.

We saw it in Enron and other corporations where men went to jail.  In my company, the 90 percent in top management of good character went along to get along when malfeasance was apparent, and said and did nothing.  I instead retired at thirty-five and came to Florida. 

*     *     *

Wealth creators such as Steven Jobs of Apple and Bill Gates of Microsoft are the rule rather than the exception, in my experience, as no one works harder and smarter with more focus and dedication than people of this ilk. 

I’ve often thought that had I stayed in the corporation I would have long since been dead.  Instead, I took a two-year sabbatical, then went back to school, and finally reentered the corporation as a paid observer as an organizational development psychologist.  I didn’t have the headaches, the heartaches, the tough decision, the incredibly long hours, the sleepless nights, the lack of time for just hanging out that are part and parcel of running things.  No one ever knew, not even top management that I served, that I had once worn an executive's uniform. 

The corporation became my laboratory, and I have been writing about it ever since.  So, I feel your anger and I know my words will not dissuade it, but I do hope they give you a little perspective.

Finally, and this makes me particularly sad, people have confused rights with privileges.  They nail themselves into a box by not studying in school, not practicing the work ethic on the job no matter how mundane or boring the work, not living within their means, not developing their own legitimacy by being the center of their own lives rather than looking to American Idol, or Hollywood, or the NFL, NBA, NHL or MLB for their ego ideal.

Life has become surreal.  Our electronic wonders, as much as they have broken down the barriers between borders and people, have failed to restore our moral compass, and as a result we have lost our way.  Our institutions have failed us because we have failed our institutions.  We have been a little like those good executives in my company that went along to get along rather than demanding and contributing to the change that sustains us. 

A president or a CEO or member of our family or a friend cannot carry us because they cannot be us.  When they attempt to carry us, it weakens us and our resolve to carry ourselves. 

Yes, there are the homeless, those not able to take care of themselves due to illness or circumstance, and we need to provide a safety net for them.  But what has happened before, is happening now, and will happen again, and that is that people will seek that safety net when they are able bodied.  They will point fingers and avoid discussing relevant issues, as they are bent on escaping shouldering their own burden. 

That is why I say I am ambivalent.  You may throw the baby out with the bathwater, but you can’t blame the water provider if you do. 

Government employees, educators, and the religious, do not create jobs nor do malcontents and protesters. 

Jobs are created by people with ideas with the courage and stamina and the risk taking inclination to see such ideas to fruition.  Ideas are the province essentially of the young, the untried, the naïve, the daring and the gambler, people who are unimpeded with the heavy baggage of the naysayer, of the old, of the experienced, of the tired, of those set in their ways, of the know it alls, the righteous, the moralists, and the protectors of the status quo. 

One reason, and it is implicit in your comments, is that what is happening at the top may be a manifestation of the fact that we are an older society even though not long in years, a society of an increasingly senior population not adequately replaced with youth, of a possible dying national character, and therefore of declining social and economic world dominance. 

Time will tell, but extreme behavior is an unconscious manifestation of unknown terror that the conscious mind has not yet understood as the reason it behaves as it does. 

Think, express your anger, be not afraid of being misunderstood or of your views being rejected, but continue to contribute to the cultural dialogue because I see that as our only salvation.  Thank you for your comments.

And be always well,

Jim

*     *     *

IS THIS OUR SPUTNIK MOMENT?

IS THIS OUR SPUTNIK MOMENT?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 27, 2011

President Barak Obama gave an inspirational speech as his State of the Union Address rather than a laundry list of what we can or must do to sustain the future of the United States (Tuesday, January 25, 2011). 

It lacked the normal applause and the ceaseless standing ovations typical of this address.  This was never more so than when he claimed that this was “our sputnik moment.”  It would seem that most in the house, the 435 Congressmen and Congresswomen, the 100 US Senators, 9 Supreme Court Justices, along with staff members and distinguished guests missed the hysteria of 54 years ago when the USSR launched a satellite into space, changing the future of mankind forever.  I say this because you could hear a pin drop when he said it.

The president used this hook to show that at a time when there was no American Space Program, no supportive technology, and neither the engineering nor rocket technology to support such an effort the Russians had done it, they had beat us in space.  Yet, in a decade, the US had a man on the moon.

The idea the president was promoting was that when Americans make up their minds to do something they do it.  He mentioned the great American technological achievement of the transcontinental railroad.  He could have also mentioned the building of the Panama Canal. 

The railroad was built primarily with imported Chinese labor, while the Panama Canal was built primarily with men from the West Indies.  American labor in both instances was mainly missing as men of color did the hard labor, while whites, whatever their skill level, were more comfortably employed in other pursuits.

*     *     *

Some sociological changes that occurred after Sputnik are interesting to report.  Science fiction was a big market for young people prior to 1957.  The science fiction magazines, books, television programs, and films treated outer space as if it belongs by natural rights to Americans.  In these dramas, explorers, settlers, daredevils, even comic book heroes were all Americans in storyline. 

And then out of nowhere, the first bona fide space vehicle Sputnik was Russian, not American! 

Hysteria was in the air.  The “new math” and “open classroom” were invented.  This was meant to create an organizational infrastructure to support a technology of layers upon layers of technical management with our neglected production workers, essentially unschooled, unskilled, and poorly trained left in the lurch.  America was on a mission and the ends justified any means no matter the sacrifice or displacement.

NASA was created with a whole new dynamic in our culture.  We now had astronauts.  We also learned a whole new vocabulary as Houston talked to these astronauts from central control as they spun around the globe.  It was like science fiction ouf of "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century," or was it?

*     *     *

While NASA was gearing up, the nation’s mass culture was gearing down.  It turned away from science fiction movies and TV shows to westerns.  In the western, there was never any doubt who would win.  Scores of television dramas such as "Gunsmoke," "The Bounty Hunter," "Wagon Train, et al became the fodder of the popular culture, along with films of the same genre.

Another thing was going on about the same time as Sputnik.  It was called “automation.”  The president alluded to its impact in his State of the Union address when he mentioned a steel mill once employed 1,000 workers but now employed only 100. 

Automation was to take the place of unintelligent labor, or stated another way, replacing brawn with brains, electronic automated brains. 

It first replaced assembly line workers, the kind doing dull repetitive work.  It was thought this work was not conducive to thinking.  It was claimed to paralyze the human spirit, and to give rise to “the alienated worker, self-estranged from job and identity.” 

All that messy, boring work, experts insisted, would be taken over by machines.  It was “Deus ex machina,” a god from the machine.  The machines would solve our problems.

*     *     *

An automated future was presented as a good thing.  This would cause productivity to explode, standards of living to rise, plus it would sustain economic growth. 

No one seemed concerned about all the people who worked for generation after generation doing mundane labor, who lacked the opportunity or inclination to learn new skills, and who were perfectly happy doing manual labor.  What was supposed to happen to them?  Did anyone consider them in this equation of automation?  Did anyone stop to think if automation took their jobs, what were they supposed to do to support themselves?

Most reading this are too young or have forgotten the hard effects on ordinary workers when automation arrived for real.  It was about the time of Sputnik. 

In the 1950s and 1960s tens of thousands of blue-collar workers were laid off because of automation.  Most of these workers belonged to unions, and unions had grown strong since the 1930s.  So, there were constant strikes in the automotive, steel, and the coal mining industries, among others. 

Workers retained benefits and compensation concessions because companies could afford it, leastwise in the short term, when business was booming.  No one seems to have worried about unintended consequences such as worker morale when they were paid more and more to do less and less, or what would happen to the viability of these industries when the bubble burst.  Workers were asleep, but so was management.  

Gradually, automation became accepted, adjustments were made, and there was some easing of the pain.  We can say today that most of that pain has been absorbed. 

Now, workers are hit constantly with another reality: plant closings and plant relocations to other countries, mergers, redundancy exercises, restructuring and reengineering.  A whole new vocabulary of interventions has followed in this wake.  This, too, has eased over the years as the "child of automation" has found ways to upgrade its skills and rise a little higher on the food chain.

*     *     *

The child of automation is now the computer and the Internet.  The child of automation reduced the blue-collar workforce by two-thirds to three-quarters, and is still counting.  That workforce will never come back. 

Now, the "child of the computer and the Internet" is replacing the white-collar workforce: the manager, the supervisor, the staff engineer, and the secretary.  This is happening as surely as the assembly line robot took the place of the lunch-bucket brigade. 

The ranks of middle management are disappearing at an alarming rate.  It is conceivable that this disappearance will parallel the blue-collar workforce's disappearance by 2025.  Add to this the fact that for all intent and purposes there is no viable union movement today.

*     *     *

Before World War Two, there were three to four levels of management, the man in charge, the manager of operations, the supervisor and the administrator.  This grew to as many levels as twelve layers of management after World War Two, with the most noticeable swelling of what became known as “middle management.” 

In the computer and Internet age, you find in any large company bosses and executives as representatives of the stockholders at the top.  They count the numbers and issue the orders and make the decisions.  At the bottom are the workers on the line, expendable and interchangeable, who make whatever is being made.  Between the top and the bottom, until now, has been middle management.

It was the job of middle management to interpret the bosses for the workers, and the workers for the bosses.  It was a hierarchical structure, a pyramid in which it was the job of the middle managers to pass information (orders, specifications, requirements) down to the workers, and to pass up to the bosses the record of accomplishments of what actually had been done. 

Middle management has had the responsibility to pass to suppliers the information regarding the raw materials needed, and to distributors the information regarding what finished products were available.  It seems absurd now but middle management once considered itself as the essential conduit and primary component in the process of information exchange from the top to the bottom. 

Alas, once the computer and Internet were brought into the equation, and made viable as they have been progressively so in the last ten to fifteen years, there is little need for middle management.  There is no need for the hundreds of thousand, indeed, millions of middle managers in the equation. 

*     *     *

Middle managers reading this might say, "Bullocks!  Of course, middle management is necessary."  Then as I have heard before, "Aren’t you that angry guy that wrote WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS a score of years ago, and book after book since with that same message?”  I would have to answer in the affirmative.  I would also have to confess that the process I envisioned has accelerated.

In the face of this, I’m not advocating a stand, I’m simply recording a trend.  Middle management might take comfort in the fact that there are more than 10,000 colleges, community colleges and universities that still give MBA graduate degrees to hundreds of thousands of middle managers. 

I won't dispute this fact.  Nor will I argue that more and more college graduates, an army of which many have MBA degrees, are competing harder and harder for less and less jobs, until the day in the not too distant future arrives when there are none.  They will have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in a management class that is anachronistic and a once valued position that is atavistic.  

*     *     *

The irony here is that few seemed concerned when tens of millions of blue-collar workers were put on bread lines, dependent on social services, had to take jobs a fraction of their former pay, were made homeless, or driven to alcoholism, drug abuse, divorce, or yes, even crime.  They were always considered expendable. 

Corpocracy does not take too kindly to observers such as this writer who report what has been so clearly on the wall.  As the imminence of this trend was becoming increasingly undeniable, universities did not change their curriculums to make them user-friendlier to a computer and Internet connected society, nor did employers, nor did the government. 

Institutional society milks ideas long after the cartoon is empty.  This is because they have a vested interest in the status quo, in perpetuating things as they are.  They are locked into myopia, into infallible authority, and no matter what the calamity are driven to do business as usual.  Our president thinks this is our "Sputnik moment."  Do you?  Do they?

We are in the midst of a flood of changes brought on by the computer and the Internet, and it will not end with these new technologies.  If anything, it will only accelerate.

In the face of this, President Barak Obama reminded Americans in his State of the Union speech that we are ninth in college graduates of advanced technology nations.  Half of our black youth do not finish high school, more than a third of Hispanics fail to do so, and a quarter of whites fail to finish this minimum education benchmark.  Is this our Sputnik moment?  If it is, it hasn’t trickled down to too many.

*     *     *

Finally, every era has it own content of character, its morality and code of ethics.  This is all dependent on how people think and what they think important. 

The president mentioned Facebook in his eulogy to technology, what I see as an empty moment of disconnection with and through electronic social connection.  Two police officers here in Tampa gave their lives when they attempted to arrest a felon.  They had a passion to serve and protect.  It was reported that half the people at the funeral were texting or tweeting while the minister was giving his sermon of their ultimate sacrifice.

There have been times in human history when duty and honor were considered the most sacred qualities.  This is not such a time with the possible exception of the military and law enforcement.  There has been too much corruption in the Church and incompetence in education and enterprise to extend the honor to these professions.

In the early days of the American Republic, the work ethic was our greatest expression of morality.  This gave way to acquiring property and fulfilling the American dream. 

“Having” became valued above everything else.  A person’s worth was measured by what he had.  This has progressed to what we have today the ends justify the means.  If you take a short cut and get away with it, fine.  Avoid the hard work, the preparation, the diligence and frustration, the necessity for failure on the way to success, and gamble on the future by taking unconscionable risks, or walking over other people who are not as swift.  You think I exaggerate?

Government leaders defend their actions on the basis of their goals.  It led to the economic meltdown of 2008 and the debt crisis of 2011.  CEOs made sweeping business changes that permanently disrupted lives, such as downsizing, plant closings and relocations on the rationale that means justify ends.  Many corporations, banks and Wall Street firms went belly up in 2008 taking risks with reckless abandon.  They were considered too big to fail practicing the morality that ends justify the means. 

Nothing has changed.  These operations are all back to practicing the morality of ends justify the means with the same insourciance.

These words will not change anything.  I know that.  I’ve been writing them for years and get no satisfaction in writing them now.  My innings are growing shorter, and I will have to say with all the wonderful societal and technological improvements, having been born during the Great Depression, it would seem people counted for far more when they had far less, knew less, and were far less comfortable than they do now.

*     *     *

  

MY PROBLEM WITH FACEBOOK CONFIRMED

 MY PROBLEM WITH FACEBOOK CONFIRMED

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 16, 2011

*     *     *

Buddhism has an expression, “You cannot push the water.”  You cannot derail Facebook with good sense when nearly 600 million people find it addictively attractive. 

Yet, it does provide copy for cartoonist Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury fame, David Brooks the balanced and cerebral New York Times columnist, a storyline for television's "Miami CSI," a novel of Val McDermid, a currently popular film, and a study by an MIT psychologist, and this is just the first wave.

Our addictions, and Facebook is an addiction have no doubt about that, but why or where it is going is quite another thing. 

In our cut and control society, as intelligent and cognitive aware as we choose to think we are, we continue to fall into unintended consequences and have done so since we were hunters and gatherers with no idea what tomorrow might bring.  So, why should now be any different?

We embrace new ideas and new ways of doing things without a single thought of what we might be giving up never to experience again.  Not to be labor the point, but when we were hunters and gatherers, men when out and hunted and women created something approaching domesticity.  There was no such thing as marriage but a kind of communal sharing primarily for the purposes of survival.  It was a matriarchal society with a kind of law and regulation conceived and enforced by women.  We have gone through many iterations over the last 12,000 years to arrive at the current status, and we have arrive here as much by hook and crook and by any carefully weighed out and deterministic policy or strategy.  We like to think our forebears were less informed and sophisticated than we are, and therefore more likely to stumble forward, when we have been stumbling forward for all of those 12,000 years, only we have developed a vocabulary, and what I am doing here to make it seem as if we know what we are about, when we don’t have a clue.  We just climb the mountain because it is there, and we embrace the new technology for the same reason. 

We celebrate people – now mainly children – who create this technology and then make them $billionaires. 

We didn’t one day say, “Let’s create a celebrity culture that looks at problems of society skin deep and adore them as if they were gods.”  No, we do so incrementally, unconsciously, and clueless.  We stumble forward as if we have blinders on, and feel good about ourselves as we solve crises along the way never fully realizing we are dancing to a very old tune. 

*     *     *

In the last hundred years or so, we have labeled our way forward as if they were road signs that were put up after we had already past such junctures: the “Roaring Twenties,” the “Jazz Age,” the “Lost Generation,” the “Beat Generation,” the “Hippies,” the “Yuppies,” Generation “X” and Generation “Y” and the current Generation “ZZ” or something like that.

Children, Eric Hoffer says, have created each age through their games and toys, and the wider society than adopts these games and toys as their legitimate means of communal living and behaving.  Why should this age be any different?

Anyone who was a parent in the 1960s and 1970s knows that the nuclear family, the central focus of the communal church, and parental control of children was thrown out the window, as these children became their own parents, as parents were too busy working to have time to manage a family.  The sit down family dinner became as common as women wearing last year’s fashions.  The classroom became a war zone, and education was reduced to social promotion and a license to do whatever without consequences. 

Small wonder that when we ceased to commune in communication, to relate in relationships, and to marry to enjoy sex that we would be attracted to a world of virtual reality where none of this mattered.   

Again, during the 1960s and 1970s, when parents were working all the time, and their kids were being their own parents, the family breadwinners looked around and saw the amoral lifestyle, the drugs, the partying, the provocative dress and insouciance of their siblings, and said, “Hell, let’s join them!  Why let them have all the fun?”  Parents became as juvenile or more so than juveniles. 

It was then that Playboy took off, and the pornography industry hid behind the First Amendment and social cohesion lost its civility, structure and confidence.  It didn’t stop with parents mimicking their children in dress and manner; parents didn’t want to grow old and so they refused to grow up. 

That was the general climate in the economically prosperous West when Facebook and all its earlier and subsequent versions showed up.

*     *     *

Some years ago I wrote a book never published, WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE?  It is apropos to our times.  It takes a lifetime to realize we all create our own cage, and then occupy that cage, and defend it to the death.  We fail to realize it is a cage, but choose to see it as reality and truth personified, which it is not.  It is a cage trust me.

We selectively choose information that supports our cage and disparate information contrary to its justification or anyone who differs with that rationale. 

We are all victims of second hand information, and therefore live largely second hand lives.

My problem with Facebook is the idea of “social networking,” which I see as an oxymoron.  It is not social but the antithesis of social.  There is little or no actual social contact.  It is not networking in the normal sense of the word, but electronic networking.  Social implies interpersonal relationships.  This seems doomed to history, as personal exchange is now mainly electronic. 

Sociologist Erich Fromm was of another era but his words seem to fit what I’m trying to say:

“It is the fact that man does not experience himself as the active bearer of his own powers and richness, but as an impoverished thing, dependent on the powers outside himself, unto whom he has projected his living substance.”

It appears I am not alone in this dialectic.

*     *     *

OTHER VOICES OTHER VIEWS

Gary Trudeau in his Doonesbury of the current Sunday (St. Petersburg Times, January 16, 2011) continues the episode of Roland Hedley’s tweeting.  His protagonist is unconscious of the world around him or the people in it.  Even when he retires for the night, he can’t stop tweeting. 

*     *     *

David Brooks in the same issue on the Ed-Op page addresses the issue of civility in the wake of the tragedy in Arizona where a young man gunned down six people, and wounded several others including Congresswoman Gabby Gifford.  Brooks writes:

“The problem is that over the past 40 years or so we have gone from a culture that reminds people of their own limitations to a culture that encourages people to think highly of themselves.  The nation’s founders had a modest but realistic opinion of themselves and of the voters.  They erected all sorts of institutional and social restraints to protect Americans from themselves.” 

He goes on to say we have become narcissistic – Christopher Lasch’s book called the United States “The Culture of Narcissism” (1979) – and self-congratulate ourselves for the smallest achievement, such as hitting a home run, making a tackle in sport, or doing a good deed.  Brooks concludes we have lost our social connection, and the best evidence is that we have lost our modesty.

*     *     *

“CSI Miami” (WTSPTV January 9, 2011) had a storyline that combines some of the ideas I’ve expressed here.  It is a fictional drama but often fiction gives us clues to reality.

A man is murdered and the CSI crew thinks it is because of a Facebook electronic liaison between a teenage girl and a middle-aged man who pretends to be a teenage boy.  CSI suspect a jealous teenage boyfriend of the girl, who views the exchange on Facebook, is the killer.

It turns out that the middle-aged man pretending to be a teenager has been enjoying this electronic tryst with the mother of the teenage girl.  Complicating the matter further, a total stranger who falls in love with the mother, whom he believes to be the teenage love of his life, is the actual killer.  He doesn’t know the girl, has never met her, and only “knows” her electronically.  Meanwhile, the teenage girl has nothing to do with the whole affair.  She is an honor student and citizen, and the only adult in the drama.  The mother and the murdered middle-aged man are the addicted ones to Facebook, looking to find a spark lost long ago in life.

*     *     *

Suspense novelist Val McDermid's "Fever of the Bone" (2009) deals with a maniac that uses social networking sites to groom his victims, who are innocent of his chilling campaign, but attracted to his enticing words on a social network called "RigMarole.  Again, it is fiction but it shows how the most socially naive users of this media have no idea of its capacity to do harm in the wrong hands. 

*     *     *

MIT scholar and psychologist Sherry Turkle has written “ALONE TOGETHER” (2010).  She has spent 30 years studying how people have come to interact with computers.  She has spent more than a decade writing this book, which shows how we have substituted technology to mediate social interaction.  This includes texting, emailing, twittering, Facebook as substitutions for face-to-face relationships. 

It is comical if it were not so bizarre.  Social digital transformation finds teenage girls and older looking for men using software to make themselves look thinner and more attractive on Facebook photos. 

Turkle doesn’t limit the scorn to teenagers or young adults, but to BlackBerry addicted parents who text their way through dinner, watching television, and even driving their children to school, failing to recognize the robotic character to their everyday life. 

The psychologist is a scientist and has not appetite for scolding.  She is simply pointing out how emotionally blasé we have become as once again technology is leading us rather than our harnessing, controlling and using technology to guide us into the future.

*     *     *

We may not be able to push the water, but we can harness it if we wake up.

*     *     *