Popular Posts

Friday, August 31, 2012

FRIDAY WITH RITA

FRIDAY WITH RITA

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 31, 2012


REFERENCE:

Rita W. is a person who qualifies as the “salt of the earth,” writing her thoughts and experiences periodically on Dr. Donald Farr’s Network, which is an e-mail community of mainly Iowa born citizens living in Iowa or across the world. 

In this particular instance, she makes reference to the last paragraph of my missive, “The Story of Shay…” (Published in these pages yesterday):

Life is a story, and this piece is part of my reaction to what I see and feel.  It is the lament of a philosopher, who is in his last innings, knowing that technology, which is celebrated as if it were a god, has put the technocrat on center stage with little sense of where technology will take us.  We have gone from a God-centered spiritual universe to a man-centered secular universe to an other world-centered universe, which I’m not sure has much room for man and therefore for empathy.

In her note, she mentions the nonfiction novel, “Tuesdays with Morrie,” which was a conversation between author Mitch Alborn and his former professor Morrie Schwartz, who was dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS).  She also disputes my remark, “I’m in my last innings.”  In a way, she jarred me out of frustration in not finding a publisher for “A Green Island in a Black Sea,” which is a novel about South Africa during apartheid.  Now, two decades after apartheid ended (1991), and majority rule put in place, the African National Congress is showing signs of the draconian rule of the Afrikaner government.

*     *     *

RITA WRITES:

Dr. Fisher,

My son, Ben, said much the same as your last paragraph states.  His industry, Multi-Media, high tech, is the only area of the economy avoiding the pitfalls of unemployment. 

My other son decided his new job is not a good fit and is coming home for the winter to take some classes at Western Moline (Illinois) campus and do some artwork and photography.  He wants to find his bliss.  He always wanted to be an art teacher and only needs his student teaching. He has taught at the city colleges at night classes, Truman and Roosevelt. He is rethinking about the big bucks.

They are hiring in Chicago area.  I know the rest of the country is depressed in the teaching field. 

Your thoughts are always of interest.  I thought of you when the miners were shot in Africa.  Now I read of miners slaughtering the natives in the deeper parts of the rainforest in Venn.  Man's inhumanity to man. 

I heard a reading on NPR this a.m., “Visits With Tom.”  Very simple, it was along the lines of “Tuesdays with Morrie,” and enjoyable.  I could see every item in Tom's workshop as he made those old wooden wheels. 

Yesterday, I was reading “Down a Country Lane,” a gathering of columns from a gal who wrote for a small county paper in Iowa and also did a weekly radio show. 

She is now 93 finally putting out that book to join her 11 others, said she was going for a baker’s dozen. 

She keeps a poster of a rocking chair on the wall with a red slash thru it.  So lets not hear anymore about last innings. 

My brother, Frank, was a navy corpsman too, attached to Marines out of LeJeune during the Bay of Pigs.  But most of his time was spent as athletic trainer/medic at the Naval Academy. 

Frank got booted out for being too loud about the straight cut of the football helmets at the back of neck, and then a player got his neck fatally broken. 

In the days of Joe Bellino (Naval officer, 1960 Heisman Trophy winner, and former half back for the Boston Patriots American Football League team), Frank drove his Volkswagen Beetle back from there with one of the Olympic oars atop.  It was on display at Sportsman’s for years.  The guys gave it to him in appreciation of his concern for them.  He was sent off to Bay of Pigs from there.  Short note getting long.  Bless us all.

RW 


DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Rita,

I enjoy your notes, and the many dimensions of your wonderings.  You are some writer in your own right.  Your sons epitomize what I think we are losing, that American spirit of individualism, moral integrity, and yes, bliss, for following our own lights as those lights are revealed to us, and going against the grain when the grain is suspect.  Bully for your brother!

We have reached the point where what separates us, personally, has more value than face-to-face relationships.  Education is moving to remote with on-line learning, while people are paying more attention to their electronic devices than to the world around them.  What now constitutes the real world is mainly surreal world of reality television where people flaunt their stuff forgetting intimacy is personal and private.

Like that 93-year-old author, my South Africa will complete a dozen published books for me, that is, if it ever gets published.

It is the story of a quite ordinary Iowa boy, who by the accident of his birth in a time of tremendous opportunity, coming of age after WWII, benefiting mightily from the support and wisdom of his mother, rises far above his station to rub shoulders and elbows with the movers and shakers of his time. 

He first enters this world through books and ideas, where he excels, only to find the world of reality not a match.  Everything falls apart when he takes on a major assignment in South Africa.  He comes to feel betrayed by his country, company, church and programming, descending into self-doubt, suspended in animation with no tether or anchor to his soul. 

It is a psychosexual novel blatant in its intimacy and honesty that has taken me a lifetime to write.  The theatre of the novel is a family being torn to sheds in a foreign land as that family’s America is having the same experience.  It is 1968.  It is a novel of the fragility of the human soul, and how all the artificial social constructs prove of little support in crisis.  

This poor Iowa boy, who makes more in a year than his da made in a lifetime, feels he has no option but to fire the company, and he is not yet in his mid-thirties.  The book begins and ends as it begins with the protagonist in the confessional in a downtown Chicago Roman Catholic Church.
*     *     *
Like you, I was devastated by the news of the 34 miners killed by police in a gold mine outside Johannesburg, a mine I write about in my novel that I visited when I first came to South Africa.  In fact, the novel begins with that visit of a Sunday when the miners dance for the white executives and their families. 

This recent event reminds me of another terrible day in South Africa’s history.

Josiah, the gardener, is murdered on Dirk Devlin’s estate, Devlin being the protagonist of the novel.  Josiah was a man Devlin liked and respected and grew to cherish as a friend, although Josiah said he could never be his friend because he was a Bantu (black). 

The police treat the gardener’s death as if a dog had been killed: “Bantu are always killing each other.”  Devlin (he prefers being addressed by his surname) and his driver, Daniel, are in conversation as Devlin is trying to get his mind around this tragedy.  What follows is taken from the novel.

*     *     *

Daniel stopped at the curb and turned his head to look at Devlin in the back seat.  “So, when you say you want to get involved in the murder of Josiah, this is the political mountain you have to climb, and if you decide to climb it I am almost certain you will be deported.”

Devlin didn’t know what to say.  He was in a draconian system, structured, detail specific, to exceed any he had ever encountered.  “What about the police?”

“What do you mean?”

“The system is severe but are the police ..”

“Cruel?  Is that what you wonder?  They can be if you step out of line.  They don’t like us and we don’t like them.  The South African Police Force is a national police organization.  It is an army that rules like an occupational force in a country where the minority rule, and are out numbered by the majority five to one.”

“Isn’t that putting it a little harsh?”

“A little harsh?  Is that how you see it?”

“Daniel, I don’t see it any way.  I’m just trying to work out what is what.  Calling the police an occupation army, well, that seems a little over the top.”

“Have you heard of the Sharpeville Massacre?”

“Yes, some kind of an uprising, wasn’t it?  Polychem gave me little cultural orientation for this assignment.”

“You call it an uprising?”  Daniel looked at Devlin with a measure of disgust.

“Well, wasn’t it?”

Daniel’s lean taut face looked as if the skin would split, his eyes downcast as he pulled back out into traffic.  “On the twenty-first day of March, 1960, the South African Police set up Saracen armored vehicles in a line facing the black protesters, and fired upon the crowd, killing 69 unarmed men, women and children.” 

There was a lull until Daniel got out in the flow of traffic again.  “After twelve years of passbook humiliation, being incarcerated for no crime other than a passbook violation and imprisoned for up to 90 days without formal charges, the people of Sharpeville had had enough.  Some 7,000 men, women and children marched to the local police station, and offered themselves to be arrested for not carrying passbooks, and instead were greeted with a barrage of gun fire.”

“Why would the police fire on peaceful demonstrators?”

“Because they could.  They killed 51 black men, 8 black women, and ten black children, and wounded 130 black men, 31 black women, and 19 black children.”

Devlin flinched every time Daniel said ‘black,’ feeling the pain and the dread of his words and loss.  What could he say?  Finally, he asked, “Daniel, are you all right?”

“Yes,” Daniel replied.  He didn’t look at Devlin but added, “I thought you should know.  I don’t expect you to understand.”

“I don’t understand. I don’t understand at all.”

“The police fear us because we have the numbers but they have the weapons.  We’re not allowed to have weapons.  You do know that two years ago the architect of apartheid was assassinated?”

“Yes,” he answered.  How could he tell Daniel that the prime minister was a friend of Nina’s mother?  “I know his name was Verwoerd,” he spelled it out. 

“Yes, Hendrik Verwoerd.”

“Were you happy about that?”

“Happy?  No, why should I be happy?”  Devlin felt stupid for asking.  “It didn’t help the Bantu or change the apartheid policy if that’s what you mean.”

“Daniel, how insensitive you must think I am.  I’m sorry.”  He looked at his watch.  “Please bear with me, I still must make a routine call on the police station for no other reason than to satisfy my curiosity.  It is to honor Josiah, and to work toward closure.”  Daniel turned to look at him.  “No, Daniel, I promise I won’t make matters worse.”

*     *     *

 But of course Devlin did as the novel moves towards its denouement.  Thank you for taking me out of my doldrums.

Be always well,

Jim

Thursday, August 30, 2012

TOUCHING STORY INADVERTENTLY TELLS ANOTHER STORY ABOUT US AND OUR TIMES!



James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 30, 2012

REFERENCE:

A story has circulated on the web; a story I’m told is not new, a story with no clear reference to its authenticity, but a story nonetheless heartrending.  It is a story of a boy congenially limited who is shown empathy by a group of boys playing baseball.  They invite him to play with them. 

The father tells the story.  This makes it suspect for me as the parental presence, or the authority figure implies empathic behavior is exceptional rather than common among the young.  I segue beyond this to suggest such caring was not rare when I was young, as individualism was its own critic and managed its own criteria with little intrusion from the adult world. 

What Tom Brokaw calls “the greatest generation” was ordinary kids used to thinking for themselves with a natural camaraderie that was not the product of programmed regimentation.  These ordinary G.I.’s won WWII. 

Play for that generation, as kids, was self-organized around common interests with creative sorting out what they would do.  That was the generation of the 1940s.  Once the war was over, the retreat from individualism commenced with experts dictating the programming.  It is why the Shay story seems exceptional today, and why the baby boomer generation (born between 1946 and 1968) is the least adult and most regimented society in American history.  Its prototype is the technocrat. 

Before WWII, leaders rose quietly, inauspiciously with little inclination for show, but with competence.  “Quiet Hero” (2011) reviewed on these pages was about Ken Ploen, an athlete and scholar who epitomized the pre-baby boomer generation.  His kind was not rare in kindness or empathy.  I had the privilege of knowing him and playing athletics with him at the dawn of his career.  He rose out of common ground born in a place called “Lost Nation, Iowa.”

We have lost that individualism and quiet heroism, and have become a regimented society where someone else calls all the plays with us expected to perform on cue.  As a consequence, we muddle forward in a leaderless society.   Our programmed regimentation has turned us away from being strategic thinkers to tacticians implementing someone else’s ideas.   

HEARTS AND NOSTALGIA


This story is printed in large colored boldface letters, which I found to be a turnoff.  I felt empathy for the boy, as have other respondents.  What follows is my comments on the Shay story shared with my e-mailers, followed by three reactions to the story with my comments to follow.  You sense from this exchange the mood and mind of persons of a certain age and experience.


DR. FISHER COMMENTS ON SHAY STORY


This is a touching story.  I think most readers know many versions of it.  Being handicapped as this youngster was, then experiencing that moment of joy, is one dimension of the wider problem of acceptance.  We have drifted from self-acceptance to the wider need of group identity, association and group acceptance.  Obviously, this is important but as complement to, not a substitute for self-acceptance.

A story in my memoir as a novel, "In the Shadow of the Courthouse" (2003) has John Knoerschild, a child prodigy and piano genius, not being able to catch a softball even thrown softly underhand. 

He would put up his hands as if the ball would hit him.  Once taught to catch the ball like a three-year-old, and he was already nine, he still never came to bat at recess, but took joy in that accomplishment. 

In my era, the Shay story would not be unusual.  We had little choice other than to fend for ourselves, to be individuals, as we made up our own play, didn't have parental supervision, didn't have Little League or fancy uniforms, didn't have so many competing stimuli telling us what we were, should be, should do, and what disadvantages we had.  We were allowed to be kids. 

There was a lot of kindness, and yes, crudeness, too, in that arena, but I can safely say that everyone eventually drifted to a suitable niche, and were accepted in that niche.  We weren’t heavy into psychobabble or causes, and therefore had little acquaintance with complaint.  It was what it was.

John was an exception.  He was light years ahead of us in the classroom.  We respected him for that.  I made it my business to walk home from school with him many nights just to soak up some of his wonder.  

He was a delight, irreverent, and sparkled so much in the classroom with his banter with Sister Mary Cecile that I still remember their exchanges with affection.

Shay didn't have the chance to develop into an extreme.  He was born as one. 

I often wondered what happened to John who was either pushed or prodded into the extreme that he was.  I can't believe that rare intelligence does not have the possibility of a counterbalance in physicality.  

Often today, young people are pushed and prodded into extremes for advantage by well meaning parents, who don't realize how much life is made up and learned as we go along.  Not given that chance or that experience contempt can come out in ways mentioned in the preface to the Shay story.     

You may think I am painting an idealistic picture for how Shay might have been treated in my day.  We were much less self-conscious, much less into do or die winning, much more into just enjoying being kids.  Regimentation has taken the fun out of being young.

I was watching teams competing in the "Little League World Series," players who have the batting gloves, uniforms, all the moves and peccadilloes of Major Leaguers. 

The baseball diamonds are immaculate, everything precise and according to code.  It is the showplace for adults with kids as the actors in their play.  And we wonder why there are no grown-ups today!  Sad.

COMMENT NUMBER ONE


Jim,
 
You are correct.  Back when we were kids, we just played and we did not really cut out those who were "not like us," at least until high school when peer pressure kicked in.  One such girl now remembers me as being the only person who was kind to her, but I do not remember being so.  I guess I was, I hope so, and if so, I am glad I was.  Kids can be cruel.

She was very poor and dressed poorly and was not able (or did not) wash well so she frequently smelled.  Sad.  Now she is a bank teller and very happy.

Peace,

Mary

COMMENT NUMBER TWO


Jim,

Just not the old sandlot days of in the shadow of the courthouse or Clinton Corn field at the end of 18th Avenue South, is it? I am so glad Little League hadn't been invented in our days. Let the kids play ball, they'll get by....

gfk

COMMENT NUMBER THREE

Hi Jim,

This is a nice story likely intended to demonstrate a type of humanity we have as children and lose as adults.

It did put a lump in my throat about ten years ago when I was copied on one of its early runs through the internet. The earliest telling I could find was by Rabbi Peach Kroch (1999). The tale was penned into a song published in 2001.

There is no way to learn whether this is a true story. If you told it to a group of kids, maybe even those in the Little League World Series, they might shrug and say, "Yeah, and what's your point?"

They understand it's a game meant to be fun for all. There may be teasing and razzing but it's part of the fun. I remember being called the strikeout king until second grade when I got glasses and could finally see the ball. Picked last but still in the game.

You, in Tampa, are currently in the middle of one of the more inhumane political campaigns many of us have ever seen. Shay or Shaya, as he was called in the Rabbi's parable, would end up jetsam in the gutter. No place for the weak or faint of heart. The middle will move to Charlotte in a couple of weeks.

On one hand, this brief slice of life could be used to indict those who claim to be he party of Christianity yet believe the sick, if poor, should heal themselves. The children, who go to bed hungry, should be ignored while 30% of well off children cause beds to sag under their obesity.

You know that poor sap who lost his job to low wage workers in China in the name of increased stock value should be glad he has a car to shelter his family from the rain and praise Wal-Mart and McDonalds for their clean bathrooms.

On the other hand, the story could support those values. Should we really prop up the weak? Is it in some way condescending to cater to those less fortunate, to create a false sense of well being or even success. Does everybody need a trophy?

Part of growth is tasting defeat and disappointment (I should know, I'm a life long Cubs fan.) 

So, forget about price supports and farm subsidies and generous tax breaks for those who drill oil wells. A couple of years ago Exxon had $20 billion in profits yet received a tax rebate of $158 million. This week a day will be dedicated to the "I built this" crowd. This day wills be rich with crowing and the government can be demonized while continuing stuffs the pockets of its critics.

Michael

THE OTHER STORY: THE IDENTIFIABLE VICTIM EFFECT AND THE FUTURE OF A MANAGED SOCIETY

We are selective in our empathy.  We individualize our empathy by giving selective attention to someone in immediate need.  We have trouble getting our hearts and minds around major issues that impact us all. 

Politicians know this and exploit it to advantage.  Senior citizens are especially vulnerable to this manipulation.  They fear the social support system will be taken from them (Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security), but fail to register the same fear regarding the soaring national debt that impacts their children and grandchildren, and the viability and stability of the nation.  Loss of the safety net is palpable in the rhetoric of the presidential campaign, when unemployment and the national debt should be the core of concern.  

President Barak Obama often sounds like a member of the Occupy Wall Street crowd rather then as Commander in Chief of the nation. 

This is not totally his fault.  This is how he has been programmed as the consummate technocrat.  We no longer produce leaders, but tacticians.

Technocrats focus on polls and operate tactically teasing out thematic concerns rather than strategically addressing core perturbations of society.  We no longer have strategic thinkers who produced the New Deal and the Fair Deal, the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine.  We have selective interventionists.  Obamacare and the taking out of Osama Bin Laden were monumental but still tactical maneuvers. 

Tacticians follow polls and play to media.  Strategists see beyond the horizon to the new tomorrow.  You don't garner immediate gratification for delayed results.  For example, prudent fiscal policies now are unlikely to reach any kind of fruition for ten to twenty years.  Consequently, it would appear strategic thinking, which is creative thinking (what we can find out) versus critical thinking (what we already know), has been leeched out of our temperament.   

No president has been reelected with such a high rate of unemployment, nor has any president seen the national debt rise so quickly and to such heights.  Indeed, no president has been less effective with Congress, yet Obama leads in the polls, while showing little capacity to lead.  Why? 

Competence doesn’t seem to matter to us as much as charisma.  Obama is likeable.  Few see Mitt Romney as charismatic, but most would agree that he is competent.  I voted for Obama four years ago, and I am a registered Republican.  I will vote for him again if he will tell me his game plan for changing his mainly failed administration around in the next four years. 

Obama cannot race bait me, or rich bait me, or scare bait me, or Bain bait me, or indeed, austerity bait me.  I know who pays the taxes, and so does he.  People pay taxes who are relatively successful, not people looking for a handout.  There is a line in one of my books that speaks to my sentiment:

To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons.  The same holds true of ourselves (The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend, 1996).

Soon, if something is not done about the national debt, all the money the federal government brings in will go to paying the interest on that debt with nothing left over for social programs much less the maintenance of the infrastructure or our military defense. 

Now why is that?

Professor H. W. Brands of the University of Texas writes in Foreign Affairs (September/October 2012) of President Lyndon Johnson being the consummate power broker.  Johnson demonstrated a kind of individualism and leadership that has disappeared in the last half century.    

Obama and Romney are skilled technocrats.  Johnson was the skilled salesman.  The narrative of the current presidential campaigns has little to do with solving rational concerns.  It is preoccupied with our irrational anxieties, appealing to our emotions, biases, and proprietary needs.  Campaign ads vacillate between the absurd and the hysterical in this connection. 

For a nation that only wants reassurance little attention is given to our fatal flaw, self-indulgence. 

We have been on this retreat from individualism and personal responsibility for decades.  Brands sees this in generational terms.  He writes:

Every generation gains its impressions of the world at a formative age.  In private life, this typically occurs in childhood.  In public life, it happens in early adulthood. Johnson’s generation came of age in the 1940, as the United States dominated the global economy as no country ever had before (or would after).

The 1920s generation was like the childhood of our nation forced on to the world stage with WWI.  Fin de siecle, we had former President Theodore Roosevelt, and his rugged individualism (“Speak softly but carry a big stick.), and then President Woodrow Wilson's internationalism (League of Nations).  Roosevelt completed the Panama Canal, which the French abandoned.  Wilson was one of the architects of the League of Nations, which he couldn’t persuade the US to join, but still set the table for the eventual birth of the United Nations as his legacy.  They were leaders.

WWII and its aftermath dominated the 1940s.  Brands writes:

President Franklin Roosevelt’s greatest contribution to the institutional power of the presidency was not the New Deal, but the postwar international order and the agencies and bureaus he and Congress established to direct it.

Johnson gets poor marks for power management internationally, but high marks for wielding influence, which is required in domestic politics.  Obama would appear to be better at power (internationally) than influence (domestically). 

The 1960s and 1970s generations were steps back into the childhood mode (baby boomers, the “X” and “Y” generations).  It was a time of cloying disenchantment and protective regimentation with a new scholastic order and curriculum brought on by Sputnik (Soviet Union first in space).  There was also the step forward with Johnson’s bold Great Society, then a step back again with the costly defeat in life and treasure in Vietnam.  Johnson understood influence but not power.  Brands writes:

To have at one’s disposal the most formidable military in world history, with the potential to annihilate a large part of the human race, is to wield power greater than that possessed by any emperor, tsar, or dictator.  And yet, the most striking characteristic of U.S foreign relations during the Johnson years was the diminishing efficacy of American power.  Johnson’s quest for power had nothing to do with foreign policy; his passions and instincts were wholly domestic.

     *     *     *

My generation came to fruition in the 1960s.  Like most young men of my generation, I spent time in the military serving at sea in the Mediterranean.  As a corpsman, I was set to go with the US Marines into Port Said in Egypt when the British and French bombed the Suez Canal.  This was halted when President Eisenhower issued a “stand down.”  Eisenhower knew war as the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe in WWII, and exercised power as opposed to influence.  He led.

In the 1960s, I also worked and lived abroad being a part of America’s emerging international corporate presence.  

Brands defines power, as the capacity to make people do what they don’t want to do; influence is the ability to make them want what you want.  My novel (A Green Island in a Black Sea) is about this wrenching dichotomy, with the focus on individualism in a collapsing world of conformity.

My lament is that the individualism I experienced as a boy that produced unconscious but sincere empathy is all but gone.  We now celebrate what once was natural. 

Life is a story, and this piece is part of my reaction to what I see and feel.  It is the lament of a philosopher, who is in his last innings, knowing that technology, which is celebrated as if it were a god, has put the technocrat on center stage with little sense of where technology will take us.  We have gone from a God-centered spiritual universe to a man-centered secular universe to an other world-centered universe, which I’m not sure has much room for man and therefore for empathy.

Be always well,

Jim.

Monday, August 27, 2012

BORN FIFTY YEARS TOO EARLY BUT THINKING THEN AS IF IT WERE TODAY!

 BORN FIFTY YEARS TOO EARLY BUT THINKING THEN AS IF IT WERE TODAY!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 27, 2012

The Library of Congress put out a reading list of  “Books that shaped America,” some 88 in all, published between 1751 and 2002.  A book reviewer noted the absence of the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allen Poe, Raymond Chandler, Flannery O’Connor, Norman Mailer and John Updike.  I could add several others.

Lists never please us nor are they meant to.  They are designed to get our attention.  Books are a joy, but experience shapes our lives.  That is why I have charted my experience in reflective tomes.  With maturity, I have moved from subjective certainty to objective doubt.  Science has followed a similar trajectory, going from neat and tidy theses to messy and chaotic theories: e.g., quantum mechanics and string theory. 

Werner Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle” comes to mind.  He notes the limits of precision in science.  If the subatomic world is uncertain, imagine how uncertain the world of psychology.  Heisenberg’s principle states that the more precisely something is determined the less precisely the momentum that follows.  This is only too true in our nonsensical world where we are constantly surprised.

Packaging can make this world appear less messy less uncertain.  Daniel H. Pink in  “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” (2009), and Dan Ariely in “The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home” (2010) are in the reassuring business.  For the effort, they are best selling authors. 

They present counterintuitive ideas that clash with the twentieth century but are expected to resonate in the twenty-first.  They do with me.  Having gone against the grain as a matter of routine, they authenticate my contrary nature.  But instead of finding this reassuring, I sense being born fifty years too early.  

DRIVE: THE SURPRISING TRUTH ABOUT WHAT MOTIVATES US


Poet Kahlil Gibran wrote a long time ago that work was “love made visible.”  Work has always been so.  Gibran, for those not familiar, is the author of that famous quote of President Kennedy, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”  He addressed his Lebanese people with that statement decades before it was uttered in Kennedy’s inaugural.  Originality seldom is in the mix in this age of celebrity.  “Drive” suffers from this precedence.

Pink uses motivation 2.0 to describe the twentieth century, where the stick and carrot game (i.e., punish and reward) prodded people to work.  He calls this “extrinsic motivation,” or external stimulation. 

Early in the twentieth century, Frederick Winslow Taylor, the efficiency expert, and the father of industrial engineering, thought most workers were “so stupid and so phlegmatic that they nearly resembled an ox than any other type.”  This stereotype became a subliminal mantra of management. 

Pink paints with a quick brush other pathfinders: Abraham Maslow and his “Hierarchy of Needs,” vying for self-actualization, Douglas McGregor’s “Theory X and Theory Y “ of management or worker centered management, and Frederick Herzberg’s “hygiene factors” (job security, good working conditions, pay, good supervision) versus “motivators” (work itself). 

Not included:  Robert Blake and Jane Mouton’s “Managerial Grid,” William Ouchi’s “Theory Z” of cooperative corporate culture, Rensis Likert’s “Four System Management,” or Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard’s “Situational Management.”  Neither Robert Greenleaf’s “Servant Leadership” nor Eliyahu Goldratt  “Goal System” for ongoing improvement was mentioned. 

Many tried to move management off its pusillanimous perch, but without much relevance or success.  Daniel Yankelovich captures this in “New Rules” (1981).  He claims pathfinders turned the working world upside down, creating a self-centered, self-indulgent working population obsessed with self-fulfillment with little interest in contribution.  For me, such workers are “suspended in terminal adolescence with the mindset of an obedient twelve-year-old” (see missive, “The End of Our Way of Life as We Know It,” August 5, 2006).

A study I conducted at Honeywell Clearwater (Florida) in 1984 of African American professionals (engineers and other professionals) centered on what motivated them.  I found Herzberg's "hygiene factors” were dominant. 

“Well, what did you expect?" was the reaction of management. 

Not satisfied, I next did a stratified random sample of the 3,000 other professionals – all white.  Hygiene factors again dominated. 

It was from that experiment that I developed my workplace cultures: Comfort (management dependent), Complacency (organizational counterdependent) and Contribution (interdependent).  It was published in several journals, and then in “Work Without Managers” (1991).

Pink mentions W. Edwards Deming, the inventor of statistical quality control and Quality Control Circles, but does not mention J. M. Juran, whose strategy for chronic problem solving ultimately contributed to Deming’s success. 

Peter Drucker comes in for praise, the quintessential observer.  He designed Managing by Objectives (MBOs), Standards of Performance, and Performance Appraisal systems, systems that left a lot to be desired in my experience.  

Pink’s self-appraisal is on target.  Bottom up assessment is more reliable if counterintuitive to top down assessment practices.  As an executive and organizational development consultant, I have found the most reliable data comes out of the trenches.

Pink reduces complex ideas to simple schemes.  The twentieth century is seen as dominated by “algorithms,” or sets of instruction meant for everyone to follow, while the twenty-first century is viewed as “heuristic,” or a solution driven culture.  Motivation is described as “intrinsic” or self-directed behavior.       

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas are profiled, and properly so, as his “flow psychology” and optimal experience, treating work as play is fundamentally solid.

Readers familiar with my works will find Pink corroborating much in these efforts.  The difference?  My works are largely empirical, whereas his are based largely on the works of economic Nobel Laureates and research studies. 

Pink wrote a splendid book on the subject of creativity (“A Whole New Mind,” 2005) that I found more substantial than this work. 

“Drive” introduces Type I as opposed to Type X personalities.  Type I refers to “intrinsic drive,” or finding satisfaction and happiness in the activity itself, as opposed to Type X or “extrinsic drive” centered on external stimulation. 

He claims corporate bonuses are not motivators, are counterintuitive and counterproductive.  He references the research of behavioral economist Dan Ariely, who will be covered shortly.

“Empowerment” policies are also given short shrift, as have I.  This was apparent in my keynote speech at a Department of Defense Contract Administrators Conference hosted by Honeywell Clearwater in 1984.

My topic?  “Participative Management: An Adversary Point of View.” 

I found the whole empowerment campaign a charade, and documented my findings.  For the effort, I nearly got fired (see missive: The 25th Anniversary of Dr. Fisher’s career changing speech, March 12, 2009).

Pink’s motivation typology is intriguing: Autonomy (self-direction), Mastery (practice, practice, practice) and Purpose (the objective seen in the context of autonomy and mastery).  I would add passion.  He then gives the reader a toolkit with a “flow test,” or a practical guide to turn “Drive” into a daily practice.  

THE UPSIDE OF IRRATIONALITY: THE UNEXPECTED BENEFITS OF DEFYING LOGIC

My first job out of university was with Standard Brands in its R&D laboratories.  Shortly thereafter, I was called to active duty in the navy.  Once out of the navy, I embarked on what I planned to be a brief career as a chemical sales engineer with Nalco Chemical Company.  I needed to earn additional funds to add to my fellowship at an eastern university in pursuit of a Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry.  Hard wired in science, it never occurred to me I couldn’t sell. 

With no training in sales, the youngest member of a seasoned selling force, I discovered an instinct for sales, which literally left veterans in the dust. 

I didn’t use sales literature, didn’t intimidate prospects, didn’t profile my company to customers as the greatest thing since slice bread; nor did I malign competitors.  I simply listened, asked questions, and assessed needs, then formed a joint problem solving partnership with the customer. 

It worked like magic.  There was no need for penalty of delay, assumptive or finesse closes.  I was a problem-solving chemist, putting the emphasis on the front end with expected outcomes.  The workplace was my laboratory.  Products we didn’t sell, such as sophisticated feeding equipment, were recommended to improve the reliability of results.  It was systems selling, but was considered irrational by my associates as it failed to follow conventional protocol.  Because of that success, and a growing family, theoretical chemistry was abandoned.

*     *     *

Author Dan Ariely, too, has had a circuitous route to his present status.  He was a physics and mathematics major, transferred to philosophy and psychology, dropped philosophy and became a cognitive psychologist, then gravitated to behavioral economics, never having studied economics formally.

Much of his work, although methodologically scientific, appears counterintuitive.  For example, he has verified that incentives diminish rather than enhance performance.  Bonuses are counterproductive.  Work itself is the key to productivity.  Work is where the greatest satisfaction is found.

Moreover, the mantra “no pain no gain” has proven also to be a myth.  Ariely has gone through much pain in his life.  As a teenager, he suffered burns over 70 percent of his body in a near fatal accident, and has had to have scores of operations over the years, and is never out of pain. 

Pain has taught him to listen to his body, and to act accordingly.  He sees athletes, entertainers, politicians and other alpha type personalities burning the candle at both ends, ignoring pain’s signals, chasing some reward or achievement.  Ultimately, they lose in the end by masking the pain with drugs or simply ignoring it. 

No surprise, he has trouble with B.F. Skinner’s conditional response behaviorism.  Skinner sees people as empty vessels responsive to stimulus-response techniques consistent with non-thinking instinctive animals.  Ariely’s research refutes this.  Behavior is largely guided by self-image, an internal mechanism.

 

WORK AND HARD WIRING


When work is predicated primarily on gain, and not on the satisfaction of work itself, there is an inclination to cheat, to loaf, and to exploit the system.   Rote work (e.g., assembly line) blunts curiosity, creativity and sound performance.  He writes:

Adam Smith’s emphasis on the efficiency in the division of labor was more relevant during his time, when the labor in question was based mostly on simple production, and is less relevant in today’s knowledge economy.

He sees the division of labor as one of the new dangers of knowledge-based technology.  Companies run the risk of taking away employees’ sense of the big picture, purpose, and sense of completion.  Highly divisible labor might be efficient if people were machines, he argues, but they are not.  Pride of ownership runs deep in our hard wiring, as does our creativity.  

*     *     *

Over the past several decades, companies have unwittingly launched multiple schemes that have invariably blunted the motivation of employees.  They have done this with what I call “corpocracy,” or the American disease (see Work Without Managers, 1991, p14). 

Work is the central part of our lives.  It is natural for people to want to find meaning in work.  Ariely writes:

If companies really want their workers to produce, they should try to impart a sense of meaning, not just through vision statements but also by allowing employees to feel a sense of completion and ensuring that a job well done is acknowledged.  At the end of the day, such factors can exact a huge influence on satisfaction and productivity.

We are goal oriented.  It is our nature, our hard wiring.  There is no satisfaction in a problem half solved.  When our efforts are unfruitful, affection for what we do plummets.

 NOT INVENTED HERE


A “not-invented here” bias can wreck a relationship or ruin a company operation.  It is why we are slow to learn from others, or borrow their ideas.  We like any solution as long as we see it as ours. 

Ariely tells the story of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla.  Tesla had a better idea with alternating (A/C) current to Edison’s direct (D/C) current, but he would never admit it, and suffered greatly for it, much of which is not popularly known (see Margaret Cheney’s “Tesla: Man Out of Time,” 1981, pp 38-50). 

The irrational bias is prominent when we fail to see the value of the work of others compared to our own.   Amateurs, or those without credentials, are given short shrift.  

This was the case with Michael Faraday, the great researcher in electromagnetism and electrochemistry, a man whose mathematical acumen did not extend much beyond simple algebra.  Yet, he changed the science of physics and chemistry forever.  We could say the same thing about Steven Jobs who, like Faraday, did not let a lack of formal technical training handicap him.

Ariely points out that an obsession with acronyms is a form of elitism, where secret codes prevent outsiders from entering sacrosanct inner circles.  Secrecy, as a form of “not invented here,” stymies cooperation and consensus building as well as creativity.

Intelligent well-meaning people, unaware of this bias, may mistakenly believe jealousy is the source of resentment.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

ECONOMICS AND THE INSTINCT FOR REVENGE


It is irrational Sunday every day in this year of presidential politics. 

Fox and CNN 24/7 cable news programs are like watching the same movie every hour of every day for two months.  Whether you’re Republican or Democrat or Independent, the same faces, the same arguments, the same nonsense is repeated so consistently that you can mouth the words before they are spoken, much like a familiar movie.  Meanwhile, newspapers have to reach the absurd to get your attention.

The Tampa Bay Times, a newspaper with a liberal tradition, likes to think itself rational, fair minded, balanced and measured in its commentary.  The other day columnist Daniel Ruth called Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan the “Atticus Grinch of Congress,” while Maureen Dowd suggested he displays the beautiful calm of the hysterical person.  Not to be outdone, Nobel Laureate in Economics Paul Krugman simply declared Paul Ryan is an unserious man, who plays a serious person on TV.

This quadrennial madness is open season on the irrational for both parties. 

Democrats paint themselves the party that seeks justice for the little guy, while Republicans paint themselves as the only grown ups in the room.  Democrats feel Republicans are betraying the rank and file, while Republicans feel the Democrats are betraying the country driving it to ruin with social welfare. Truth be told, you couldn’t find the width of a hair follicle’s difference between the two parties.  They are out to lunch and out of touch.

Despite all the bellicose, all the rhetoric of revenge, Ariely writes: The threat of vengeance can have a certain efficacy.  It is good metaphor for behavioral economics.  He suggests that although the instinct may not be rational it is not senseless and may prove useful:  

People are more trusting and more reciprocating than rational economics would have us believe.  Revenge and trust are opposite sides of the same coin. 

To put this another way, despite the collapse in 2008 of the real estate market, the shenanigans of Wall Street, bankers and the insurance industry, despite being upset with the social contract, Americans are talking, discussing, decrying excess, yes, accusing and abusing, but working out their angst in public.  This is the behavior of a democracy, which is essentially a trusting society.  Ariely continues:

Trusting societies have tremendous benefits over nontrusting societies, and we are designed to instinctively try to maintain a high level of trust in our society.

Outrage would suggest that President Barak Obama with unemployment still at 8.3 percent, and the stimulus package of questionable efficacy, soon to be voted out of office.  That would be rational.  The upside of the irrational suggests otherwise, that is, his successful return to office.

Outrage will not be apparent in the November presidential election, but public fatigue. 

People are tired of experts, tired of being told what to think and how to decide about everything.    They are tired of hearing one side is the side of angels and the other side is the side of devils, when both sides appear to have horns.  People feel exploited, lied to, taken for granted, and assumed to be ignorant.  They will vote with their feet and their pocketbooks, avoiding the poll places and the marketplace.  Stay tuned.

WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE


For the last sixty years, we have been on what Ariely calls the “hedonistic treadmill.”  It is the drive of "compare and compete" in an effort to keep up with the Jones.  After WWII, happiness was defined in material and hedonistic terms of having and doing. 

Hugh Hefner gave Freud’s “pleasure principle” his special interpretation with Playboy magazine, acting as the baby boomers’ cultural philosopher.  His devotees became the merry monarchs of the madhouse where self-indulgence became the new religion. 

This has worn thin as over indulgence always does.  Instead of the rational now mounting the high ground, an attempt to bridge ubiquitous lethargy has been provided by the pornography industry.  Religion will not kill this industry.  Boredom will.  Ariely has proven this in his studies. 

It is all a matter of self-image, which is the driver of motivation.  After decades of self-indulgence, we have reached the point of realizing wherever we go, there we are.

To a greater or lesser degree, Ariely sees the pursuit of happiness a disappointment.

That pursuit has driven many people to the edge.  They become shopoholics, drug addicts, alpha type personalities in work and leisure, or they eat, drink, smoke and party too much.  On the other hand, driven by these same demons, they become fanatical about diet, health and exercise.  In the end, excess produces diminishing returns and leaves little room for the enjoyment of life.

Then there are people who choose the safe life.  They are safe hirers on the job, behave predictably, and are considered steady and reliable.  They don’t take risks or embrace challenges.  They are the other side of a joyless economy.

Real pleasure and meaning comes from taking calculated risks, reinventing ourselves again and again as we move through our twenties to thirties to fifties and beyond.  We are the same person but wrapped in a whole new set of possibilities.   We choose to be alive instead of simply existing.

Unfortunately, our minds and bodies are programmed to fit within what society dictates as our parameters.  Many take these implied limitations seriously.  They allow others to define their place and space and happiness.  If you doubt this, consider how good looks define our place in the social hierarchy, and limit our mating possibilities.  Ariely claims we reify these limits even more by scorning what we cannot be and cannot have. 

He knows of what he speaks.  Having been burned on 70 percent of his body, essentially altering his good looks, this drew attention to his facial, neck, hands and arms scars. 

This left him with three possibilities: altering people’s perception of him, considering ranking his attributes, or sulking and drifting off into sour grapes. 

His professional success, marrying a beautiful woman and having two children with her, and earning world-class professional distinction are evidence of successful adaptation.  This involved risks, dealing with his self-image, and reinventing himself.  He writes: At the end of the day, people are the marketing terminology equivalent of experience goods.

EMPATHY AND EMOTIONS


People identify with victims.  Take a family being thrown into the street while the television cameras are running.  Tens sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars pour into the television station’s coffers for that family.  

Same scenario only now it is not a single family but thousands of families clinging to life with the television cameras rolling, as in the case with Hurricane Katrina.  Television viewers’ watch with alarm but general apathy is the response. 

Ariely sees many forces at work here: lack of information, racism, and the sheer size of the tragedy.  Mother Teresa marked the distinction: If I look at the mass, I will never act.  If I look at one, I will.

Scientists call this, “the identifiable victim effect.”  Katrina at first failed to register this, less because of the racism that Ariely mentions, but more because the information concerning those stranded was not individualized. 

The American Cancer Society does a great job of individualizing this dreaded disease with successful information campaigns.  Statistical victims represented by objective numbers and demographics fail to provide such identity.

Rationalists launched an objective campaign for Katrina with objective needs: 100,000 people have not had a hot meal in three weeks, are sleeping on hardwood floors of gyms, have no privacy, and must deal with the sweltering summer heat with no relief. 

Result: the rational campaign stifled empathy.  Why?  People’s emotions were not awakened.

Television journalists provided this emotional identity with individual interviews.  The money poured in.  Katrina was funded more generously by far than the Asian Tsunami, or epidemics in tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS none of which established a sustained emotional appeal.  Ariely writes:

It is very sad the only effective way to get people to respond to suffering is through an emotional appeal rather than through an objective reading of massive need.  The upside is that when our emotions are awakened, we can be tremendously caring.  Once we attach our individual face to the suffering, we’re much more willing to help, and we go far beyond what economists would expect from rational, selfish, maximizing agents.

 

SELF-HERDING


Perhaps because of where I am, or rather where my mind is, I found this most intriguing.  Emotions, Ariely writes, influence us by turning decisions into DECISIONS, that is, we become locked in patterns.  He calls this “self-herding.”  It comes from remembering the specific actions we have taken in the past and mindlessly repeating them anew. 

We tend to look on past actions as a guide for what we should do next, and thus follow the same basic behavioral pattern.  This is indicative of our self-image, character and cognitive biases.  It is why others, who pay attention to these patterns, can manipulate us with such finesse.  I call this "our cage" (see missive: “Who Put You in the Cage?” February 23, 2005). 

Self-herding was one reason I was successful as a chemical sales engineer. 

My clientele was primarily engineers in positions from R&D to operations, from top management to purchasing.  They took pride in the rationale of their deductive reasoning (i.e., inferences made from already formed premises) without realizing this.  It left them vulnerable to their emotional side (see Confident Selling for the 90s, 1992).

SOLUTION?  TAKE OUR IRRATIONALITY SERIOUSLY


My intention here is not to pick on engineers.  It happens that my experience in life professionally has been primarily with the engineering community from several different organizational vantage points.  

We are all fond of seeing ourselves as objective, rational and logical.  When we decide to invest our money, buy a home, choose a school for our children, pick a doctor or medical procedure, we assume our choices are wise.  Even when a pattern develops which, clearly, indicates this is not the case, we motor on believing we made the right choice but circumstances intervened.  We are good at rationalization.  This means we are good at projecting the blame, the downside of irrationality. 

We think we have common sense when there is no such thing.  Ariely has taken pains to point this out.  Giving bonuses to workers does not improve performance, while cuddling employees to satisfy their angst is counterproductive.  

In the 1960s Bethlehem Steel and Alcoa gave senior workers 13-week paid furloughs to energize greater company appreciation with the expectation of greater productivity.  They got the reverse (see Six Silent Killers, 1998, pp 89-90). 

The same is true in giving money to students for good grades.  Much of what we think is so, isn’t, but this is counterintuitive thinking. 

System researcher Russell Ackoff used this to explain how behavioral systems work:

If every system is behaving as well as it can, the whole system will not behave as well as it can.  Machine Age thinking would see it would, but the contrary is true.  If you have a system that is working as well as it can, none of its parts will be (ibid, pp 226-227).

This blows holes in MBOs, performance appraisal reward systems (which they are), HR signature cosmetic programs of “empowerment” (nothing actually changes), acronyms as elitist tools, the American disease of corpocracy, the not invented here company bias, business as usual practices after repeated corporate scandals, and the “drop-in-the-bucket” effect (where attention is on a specific need, but not on a major issue).  The national debt comes to mind. 

FINAL THOUGHT


Dan Ariely’s book as with Daniel Pink’s book “Drive,” echoes sentiments common to my experience.  The same is true, I believe, of many others.  

Here’s hoping Pink and Ariely do make a dent in our cultural apathy.  Perhaps others will be encouraged by their efforts.  I take some comfort in being born fifty years too early but thinking then as if it were today.

*     *     *