MORAL PHILOSOPHY OF A RENEGADE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 13, 2012
A READER WRITES:
I’m new to reading you. Well actually, that is not quite true. If I have a lull in my work, I check your blog from time to time. I am intrigued with the heretical aspect to your moral philosophy. It is apparent in “Present Ridiculous.” I missed this when it was first published.
You are less a “peripatetic philosopher” and more a moral philosopher after Freud. You get it all out there come hell or high water, the reader be damned! Am I right?
Signed: Curious
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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Dear Curious:
I had to smile when I read your note.
I am no Freud, closer to the influence of an Isaiah Berlin, Pitrim Sorokin or Gustave Le Bon. Berlin had Henry Hardy to edit his writing, into something of a systematic philosophy. Sorokin was a visionary; Le Bon's greatness was in taking the general and weaving it into the particular on transtemporal themes.
I got a late start in this writing business, and am trying to get as much of what I think, see, feel and fear out "there" before my light burns out.
My daughter, Jennifer, once asked me how my unpublished works compared to my published works. I thought for a second, and said, “There is no comparison." More of what I think is in manuscript form waiting for a Henry Hardy to show up after I pass on.
“Present Ridiculous” is the central part of a three-phase book: "Past Imperfect," "Present Ridiculous" and "Future Perfect." It has the Armageddon like title: “Near Journey’s End? Can Planet Earth Survive Self-Indulgent Man?" (Completed in 2004).
When this failed to find a publisher, inspired by T.S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men,” I rewrote the book from a different perspective with such chapter headings as:
(1) The Road Most Traveled
(2) Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land
(3) Nowhere Man’s Cut & Control Journey Through Time
(4) Future Perfect, or The End of Western Dominance
(5) Fast Forward to Scientists as the New Gods
(6) Man as Earth’s Destroyer
That, too, failed to generate any commercial interest, but it is “there!”
Reared as an Irish Roman Catholic, I completed a 75,000-word diatribe on my waning Catholic faith in “The Roman Catholic Laity in Search of Its Church” (Completed in 1974). Surprisingly perceptive in some parts and embarrassingly sophomoric in others, it, too, is out “there!”
During the 1990s a series of 30 Q&A responses to letters resulted in the publication of what was called “Cold Shower,” abbreviated missives of 400 words. They varied from “How never to get fired!” to “The New Professional” to “Downside of Being a Career Woman” to “Words and Wonder” to “Overwhelmed in the Land of Future Shock” to “Prison of the Mind” to “Camelot, the Auction.”
In 2009, sick to death with everything being packaged as a product, while promoting the superfluous idea that greed not combative thinking caused the 2008 meltdown, I wrote “Creative Selling: Winning through Cooperation.” Money like sin is fueled by fear and paranoia, symptoms but hardly the cause of the problem.
"Creative Thinking " is an intuitive approach to selling but uses the cognitive tools to frame the picture.
It was a clearer statement to the philosophy presented in the international best seller “Confident Selling” (Prentice Hall 1970). One publisher sent me a contract but with strings attached. Strings were what were wrong with the Prentice Hall contract, which I didn't want repeated. So, it, too, is “there.”
Earlier, after reading books on “How the Mind Works” and “Thoughts Without a Thinker,” I put together a practical guide to thinking that had worked for me with the blasé title, “Ten Steps to Confident Thinking.” (Completed in 2006).
The basic idea here is that critical thinking, the basket Western thinkers put all their eggs, has resulted in circular logic and a constant recycling of the same problems. The tsunami in Japan of 2011 is evidence of how totally critical thinking dominates and cripples.
Critical thinking can only solve problems from a perspective that is already known. There is no room for the imagination. If it can’t be imagined, the belief is that it cannot happen, but of course it does, repeatedly. My view was to complement critical thinking with creative thinking, or the embracing of the unknown, which I suggested would lead to “confident thinking." It found no interest, but it is “there,” as well.
My recent missives on the “Retreat of the Adult” and “We Don’t Choose Our Parents” have generated an interesting potpourri of comments. These missives are resurfaced aspects of, "Who Put You in the Cage” (Completed in 2005). In this manuscript, I look back on the need to constantly reinvent yourself in order to escape the cage that others have designed for you, but which I would have you refuse to settle.
There is the published work, "In the Shadow of the Courthouse" (2003), which has a manuscript of that same subject yet unpublished sitting on the shelf.
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People equate writers with authors on the best selling list. They don’t see your books there, and can’t understand why you are not available when they want you “because you are retired, aren’t you,” implying you can stop whatever you're doing because it is not that important. But time is important, and there is no way of explaining that.
Writing is self-directed and much of life is other-directed. It is a profession in which you are largely alone but it is not a lonely profession. If I am in a cage, and I can see where people might see it that way, it is a cage of my own design. Knowing this was the impetus for writing "Who Put You In The Cage?"
Some chapters of this unpublished work:
(1) Who put you in the cage?
(2) Search for identity
(3) Code of the soul
(4) Will and a way
(5) Understanding others
(6) Trying too hard?
(7) Love what you do
(8) Are you passionate?
(9) Are you You?
(10) Selling yourself
(11) Compulsions of Wannabes
(12) Signposts and Signs
(13) Enablers and Chameleons
(14) Taking control
(15) Choosing a profession
(16) Job security in an uncertain world
(17) Out of the mouths of babes
(18) Celebrate life!
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Some manuscripts don't stay on dusty shelves. One day in 2007, I came across a long essay I wrote in 1972. It seemed as apropos thirty-five years later as it did when I wrote it. The title was, “Time Out for Sanity: A Blueprint for Coping in a Sick Society.”
This was before the economic crash of 2008, but anticipated nonetheless as we were well into being the United States of Anxiety. The book was titled “A Look Back To See Ahead” (2007). It has a line that resonates to the moment: “Congress stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn’t face them, and left the future up for grabs.” After nearly a $trillion bailout of Wall Street, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the auto industry, Congress still remains like a petulant child. It is why, Dear Curious, you may have a point.
Be always well,
Jim
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