James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 20, 2012
REFERENCE:
Dr. Donald Farr, a former NASA scientist and engineer, has an e-mail (Don Farr Network) audience of some 400 or so devotees who express their opinions with naked passion and unbridled enthusiasm, currently, on President Barak Obama’s leadership, the economy, and their ideological preferences. I read them all, but seldom comment. This is an exception. I suspect they differ little with other Americans across this great country.
DR. FISHER WRITES:
Dr. Don,
I'm in the process of writing a review of Gustave Le Bon's THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REVOLUTION (1913), when I took a break to read e-mails from you. They confirm that we are all card-carrying members of the human comedy.
If anyone ever understood the human comedy and the madness it invites, it was Le Bon.
Societal madness is as endemic as personal madness. Nassir Ghaemi confirms this in A FIRST-RATE MADNESS (2012) with profiles of several presidents who were quite mad or had a tinge of madness. Conversely, sanity he shows rings false in a time of madness.
My problem with President Barak Obama, although I am a registered Republican who doesn’t always vote Republican, is not his madness, but his sanity, which seems out of joint with the times. He tries to broker a consensus with a conflicting Congress and to hold together two sides of an ideological divide from the perspective of an introvert (see my, THE MYTH ABOUT INTROVERTS).
Le Bon writes:
"Without rigidity the ancestral soul would have no fixity, and without malleability it could not adapt itself to the changes of environment resulting from the progress of civilization. Excessive malleability of the national mind impels a people to incessant revolutions. Excess of rigidity leads it to decadence."
We Americans currently straddle that divide, and have done so successfully through most of our history. We haven't allowed views of the extreme -- what William L. Livingston calls "cognitive biases" -- to fester in a closed cauldron. If we did, chances are they would surely explode and do irrevocable damage.
The Don Farr Network provides a vehicle for diverse views to be expressed, some of which I find poignant others absurd, but nonetheless interesting because I believe them all to be honest.
Le Bon continues:
"Stability is only acquired very slowly. The history of a race is above all the story of its long effort to establish its mind."
The Internet has given us a connection that acts as a catalyst to that mind, and will remain a positive catalyst as long as we, in good humor, recognize that we are all part of the same human comedy, and that there is a grain or so of truth to what we all think and say.
The role of a president is to shape these grains into a collective truth that resonates with our collective self.
Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, FDR, JFK and Reagan managed to weave threads of discord into something resembling a common fabric. Obama has yet to demonstrate that acumen as weaver. He seems to depend too much on what Le Bon calls the “invisible government,” those not elected but who perform administrative functions and dictate national policy.
I write about “leaderless leadership,” fearing we suffer from a derivative of "corpocracy,” where the survival of the institution takes precedence over its reason for existence.
I was reminded of this when I was having lunch today, watching a segment on the History Channel. It was on Andrew Jackson, a president responsible for the "Trail of Tears," driving the Indians off their land in the South and to the far Northwest. He also preserved the Union while creating the imperial presidency. Every president has benefited since in terms of power and prestige.
Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Madison and Monroe desired to relocate the Indians, but Jackson is the devil who did it.
Rightly or wrongly, Jackson is the only president to have an age named after him, a man who led autocratically in "the voice of the people” with the operational word, “led,” giving little sway or power to comfortably ensconced politicians or bureaucrats in Washington, DC.
Someone wrote to me saying, "You're encouraging revolution with some of your statements in these book reviews on Gustave Le Bon.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. My only concern, as was Le Bon’s, is that
"The multitude is the agent of a revolution, but not its point of departure. The crowd represents an amorphous being which can do nothing, and will nothing, without a head to lead it. It will quickly exceed the impulse once received, but it never creates it."
Jackson’s own vice president, John Calhoun, tried to organize the succession of South Carolina from the Union in 1832. “Old Hickory” quelled that by his promise to see that every man guilty of treason in the state would hang, and he was known to keep his promises.
Nothing is ever as it seems, and that is where the mischief grows.
Aaron Carroll of Indiana University tells us that in 2010, residents of the 10 states ranked as "most conservative" received 21.2 percent of their income in government transfers, while the number for the 10 most "liberal states" was only 17.1 percent. Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman points out the liberal states were also the poorest.
You can quibble about these statistics, but even so, it is apparent big government is not simply an ideological thing. We preach one thing and practice another. Few Americans live within their means and this has been going on since World War Two.
I wrote an essay on this on our two hundredth national birthday (January 1, 1976) titled, “American is Dead! Long live America!” (St. Petersburg Evening Independent).
This essay was published again in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD: Our Chronic Culture Viewed from the 1970’s (2003). It didn’t attract many readers, but presaged the crisis of 2008.
Jackson was not a man of words but of action. He took federal funds out of the Bank of the United States, an independent institution, and put the funds in state banks, or into the "people's banks." You can imagine what a brouhaha that created. Nicholas Biddle, the bank's president, and US Senator Henry Clay, thought this was suicide for Jackson’s reelection, but he won in a landslide. However you see Jackson, devil or saint, he was a leader.
Oil is another example of what seems to be, but isn’t. Media tell us gasoline could rise to $4 or even $5 per gallon by this summer “because of the possible skyrocketing price per barrel of crude,” given our tension with Iran and the need for oil tankers to pass through the narrow Straits of Hormuth.
Then explain how our largest export is gas and oil. American oil corporations leverage the price differential between the US and Europe to their advantage. So, when gasoline is $4 a gallon in the United States, it is likely to be close to $8 a gallon in Europe. We could have a gasolin shortage at home this summer, but this is unlikely to dissuade oil companies from exporting oil and gas abroad.
How many are aware of this paradoxical dilemma? In the human comedy, we flirt with the tragic and go steady with the absurd.
All this talk about a pipeline from Canada to the southern United States as being “our savior” is likely to only feed this already well-established funnel to Europe. Do you hear any politicians talking about this?
So much for the human comedy.
Be always well,
Jim
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