James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 18, 2012
REFERENCE:
My friend comes from my hometown. Like me, he has risen from humble circumstances and is a staunch believer in self-initiative, paying your own way, taking your lumps, and not groaning about it.
Whatever he has done, or is now doing, he gives his all. He is a strong institutional man when it comes to family, work, his beliefs, and is fanatical about his hobbies. They include catching rattlesnakes, furnishing rocks for landscaping, volunteering five or six days a week at Operation Gratitude, packing and mailing care packages to overseas troops, teaching and mentoring grad students doing military, NASA, and industrial consulting, and this all since he retired as a Ph.D. scientist and engineer for NASA.
While going to school, he worked full-time, drove racecars, built hot rods and custom cars, and raised a family. He did research for the San Diego Scientific Research Institute, where he did Paranormal Psychology Research & Development, and wrote major papers on this research. He was also instrumental at NASA during his career as one of the scientist behind all the headlines of the space program.
This response was a further amplification of my book review of Gustave Le Bon’s THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PEOPLES (1896), where my enthusiasm for the work was seen to match the conservatism of the author. It was not my intention, however true, but to engage the reader in thinking hard about this work against the reality of today.
DR. FISHER PONDERS:
Don,
Thank you for understanding my intention. BB said, "There, you did it again." She didn't expect you to understand, but I did. I applaud you as a true Renaissance man from your vocation to your avocation, both which are quite striking.
You and I are ordinary guys from an ordinary town who expected extraordinary things from ourselves, which included the risks, the disappointments, the falling occasionally on our faces, being misunderstood, and yes, even envied, when all we were trying to do was to follow the light as we were able to appreciate the light.
Neither of us had a golden parachute or parents who could rescue us when we misstep as we came from neither power nor money. We were instead fueled by love and the freedom it gave us.
I am all for hobbies if hobbies are an avenue of expression and projection from a base of success and dedication in a working life and not as an apologist for never having found love in work.
I am not for hobbies as justification for never leaving our comfort zone, for falling into the trap of a job that pays the bills but has no other upside, a job we doggedly work for forty or fifty years on automatic pilot.
I am for the passion to break out of the prison of our rote education by expecting great things of ourselves and having little interest in fitting nicely into the machine, no questions asked.
I am not for us to gravitate to a safe job or for us to behave as safe hires that won’t create waves even if the status quo is wrong.
I am for confronting our bosses or management when they or it exploit us or take our good will for granted.
I am not for us being content with being paid as little as the traffic will bear or for us to behave obsequiously as if we are lucky to have a job or to be working, when it should be the other way around. If it is not, we should move on to where we are appreciated.
I am tired of hearing we live in the land of the free and the home of the brave when our freedoms seldom include challenging the system, or when we engage in wars contractors and industrialists get rich and young people die, while the wars generally end in stalemate.
I am not for buying into the idea we should have pride in our work when our work is boring, unchallenging, repetitious, dehumanizing and has no room for our voice to improve its construction other than cosmetically.
I am for us as workers to be partners in work with the bottom of the tree getting most of the attention as that is where the answers are and where the decisions should be made.
I am not a believer that the wealth creators are those that carry money off to the bank but those in the trenches whose sweat and tears create the wealth.
“Wealth creators” have destroyed the economy through their stupidity and failure to listen to those in the know who could see it coming, but didn’t bother to mount a protest because “it was not their problem.”
I am certain Le Bon is correct that no matter how much pain the rank and file feel, no matter how much it suffers in socioeconomic terms, it is not until the elite feel the pinch that anything changes. Then, the government bails the elite out on Wall Street and in the industrial sector and nobody sees this as welfarism written large.
I am not for redundancy exercises, reengineering, downsizing, or other such practices until those who first created the mess are made redundant, reengineered, downsized, or surplused.
I am for a capitalistic system in which all employees are shareholders who have a vote in executive compensation, outsourcing, moving, merging or consolidating operations.
I am not for executive compensation that is 300 to 500 times the average worker’s pay.
I am for a safety net to all employees if one is given to senior management. If it cannot be afforded for all employees, then it cannot be afforded for senior management.
I am not for holding workers who are incompetent, or play the system, are pyramid climbers always campaigning for the next job, but for a system of pay that is based totally on performance, and not voodoo accounting favoring executives.
I am bemused with a system in which the GDP is dependent on consumer spending to the tune of 60 percent, on the one hand, while economists berate workers for not saving more on the other. Were Americans to save at the rate of the Japanese, our economy would tank. You can’t have it both ways.
I am not for buying the latest and greatest gadgets or contraptions when the one you already have works fine.
Christopher Lasch wrote three powerful books on the subject: “The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age Of Diminishing Expectations” (1978), “The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times” (1984), and “The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics” (1991).
It is no accident that Lasch wore himself out in the decades of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s trying to get America’s attention without success. We will see Alvin Toffler did the same. Nothing changed, that is, until 2007, and then the hysterical took over.
People lost their jobs, lost their savings, lost their homes, and instead of directing anger at the causers, the unemployed and the underemployed directed their wrath at their loved ones or at themselves, when they had done nothing wrong.
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Don, the reason Gustave Le Bon resonates with me is that nothing has changed in the last hundred years to make what he says less relevant today.
Incidentally, psychology, as you know, is not a school but about sixty-five to seventy different schools all looking at some aspect on the elephant that fails to take in the whole elephant at all. Le Bon took in the whole elephant and addressed this in, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PEOPLES.
The lives of people are scripted for them from cradle to grave on what job they should expect along with the limitations to their hopes and dreams. If they would read between the lines, as Le Bon suggests, they would see how judiciously and systematically this drama has been laid out. I never followed the script, nor did you.
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No man was ever under the thumb of that script more than my da. I am a sophomore in high school, and he a seventh grade drop out. Handicapped from the first, his mother died when he was born and his father took off never to be seen again. He couldn't have had lower expectations for himself, but married a gritty little woman with a high school education, my mother.One day he said, "Jimmy, it's about time you get a job and help support the family." He never did, never could. He was a courageous little man, physically, but a man with little moral confidence or courage when it came to confronting his boss with grievances.
He brought his anger home. "I've talked to my railroad buddies and they can get you a job in the roundhouse (building box cars).”
"But da,” I said, “I'm an 'A' student.”
"What has that got to do with the price of bread?"
Then my mother entered the fray, "Jimmy's going to go to college, Ray.” My da nearly swallowed his cigarette.
I suspect you had your share of opposition and support to reach your sterling heights. We never get out of the cage most of us are born into without such support.
In my life, I’ve known a lot of brilliant people who no one ever told them they were brilliant, and when I did, they would say, “That is because you are my friend, or you like everyone (which was never true), or you want to get something from me (which was also not true).”
Le Bon in THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PEOPLES writes, “The conditions of modern industrial evolution condemn the inferior classes of civilized peoples to a highly specialized labor which, far from increasing their intelligence, merely tends to lessen it.”
That was written 116 years ago, and over that last 116 years it has only intensified as Alvin Toffler revealed in FUTURE SHOCK (1970), then elaborated on it in THE THIRD WAVE (1980), and essentially marked the shift to professionals in POWER/SHIFT (1990).
In Future Shock, he showed why public education was established: an industrial society needed a workforce that could read, write and make arithmetical calculations to feed that intelligence into the god that was the machine. It was a matter of pragmatism, not altruism.
Toffler grew bolder each decade he published, more persistent, more emphatic, but nothing changed, not even education.
We have an educational system that finds at least half the workforce under educated or with the wrong skills doing work they hate or are expected to do, finding the only respite from work some hobby.
The irony here is that most work today more resembles a hobby than anything else. As you mention, you work harder than you ever did in your job. I can say the same for my writing.
Work now can be done at home, or on the fly, or wherever. Work doesn’t have to be confined to a crystal cathedral suffocating in a cramped cubicle.
Kahlil Gibran wrote that work was love made visible. Hobbies have that characteristic so why not work as well?
A provocative philosopher such as Gustave Le Bon knows that those in power are amused but not threatened by his proclamations no matter how true. He knows the first reaction of those described as powerless, or slaves to an unjust system are to defend the powerful and the system that enslaves them.
This is a normal reaction. Insight into the dilemma is likely to escape their attention. By this failure, the powerless unwittingly let the powerful off the hook, and nothing changes.
Writers such as Toffler, Gibran and Le Bon are gatekeepers to the obvious but not change masters. They cannot reduce the carnage or minimize the heartbreak. They can just read the tealeaves and discern what horrors they tell.
* * *
We are a reactive people. We have watched as 75 percent of those paying into social security were gainfully employed sixty years ago, carrying the 25 percent in retirement and on social security.
We watched as that figure dropped to 60 percent thirty years ago, and could drop to 50 percent in the present decade with a projected workforce of only 25 percent supporting a social security age majority of 75 percent in another fifty years. People now live well into their 80s, and those living to 100 or more are expected to be common by 2050.
We are looking at a bankrupt system.
What does Congress and the President do? They extend the unemployment compensation for another 79 weeks or into the third year, saying, “they have no choice.” And where do they get these unsupported funds? From the Social Security Trust.
Senator Patrick Moynihan, days before his death in 2003, unveiled a report on social security that showed it running a deficit in 2018 with a cash shortfall of more than $26 trillion. Obviously, no one was paying attention then or now.
* * *
My next review of a Gustave Le Bon book is THE PSYCHOLOGY OF REVOLUTION (1913). The last thought of most Americans would be to consider our society vulnerable to revolution. This book gives one pause as the impossible always has a way of showing up. David Brooks of the New York Times has devoted several columns to the rupture in the national social fabric, and how America is becoming an increasingly divided tribe.
Thank you for listening to my early morning tirade, and thank you for understanding me.
Be always well,
Jim
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