TALKING TO MYSELF

TALKING TO MYSELF

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

© September 25, 2012

REFERENCE:

Over the past decade (2001 – 2011), I have published a series of 30 missives on “A Way of Looking at Things.”  The topics varied from “the loss of a hero” to “what is the world coming to.”  It also covered such topics as “where have all the Catholics gone” to a tribute to my mentor, a devout Catholic, “Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth.”  I’ve also wondered about such insanities as the pervasive “cut and control” philosophy of American enterprise better known as creative destructive capitalism. 

The reception to my missives has been difficult to measure as the Peripatetic Philosopher blog indicates viewers and comments with tens of thousands viewing the blog, but only about one-tenth of one percent ever commenting.  Early on, most comments attempted to sell something.  That doesn’t happen anymore. 

The idea was not original.  I got it from reading “A Way of Looking at Things” (1987) by psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson.  This book was a collection of his published papers from 1930 to 1980. 

Lawrence J. Friedman’s biography of Erikson salutes the man as “Identity’s Architect”(1999) when he was never comfortable with his own identity.  Erik H. Erikson was not even his real name.  Often those most passionate in a singular pursuit, in this case identity, are on a solitary journey to self-discovery. 

*     *     *

The idea of “Talking to Myself” comes out of the fact that most of my creative work comes out of walking and thinking and recording my thoughts on an ancient handheld micro cassette recorder.  Virtually all my published (and unpublished) books and most of my articles come out of this peripatetic wandering. 

Aristotle celebrated this method and added to its dynamism by putting pebbles in his mouth and talking to strengthen his voice.  I don’t know if Aristotle was an extrovert or introvert but I sense from reading that he enjoyed speaking to an audience.  I have never enjoyed the process, yet a good part of my life has been spent in such a theatre.

David Brooks mentioned on “PBS with Charlie Rose” that former President Bill Clinton talked to himself by looking at himself in the mirror.  Variations of that same tactic have been common to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in preparation for his “fireside chats” during WWII, Sir Winston Churchill before addressing the British people during the United Kingdom’s darkest hour in that same war, and by the actor turned governor then president, Ronald Reagan.  Reagan gave an electrifying speech at the Republican National Convention in 1964 that eclipsed everything in Senator Barry Goldwater’s campaign for the presidency and introduced Reagan to a national audience as a political spokesman.   

*     *     *

Yesterday, PBS’s American Masters featured “The Life and Work of Carl Sandburg.”  Sandburg has been important in my life, first when my seventh grade teacher, Sister Mary Cecile, read his poem “Chicago” to the class.  I could visualize the “city of the big shoulders,” as I had been there many times with my da, a railroad brakeman on the Chicago & North Western Railroad.  I was surprised in the poem by the expression “the hog butcher of the world.”  Although I lived in farm state of Iowa, I knew nothing about farming being reared in a small industrial city on the Mississippi River.

When I was a young executive in South Africa, I had my company send me Sandburg’s “Lincoln: The War Years.”  Sandburg meant to write a letter to young people on the Civil War, but his effort grew to four volumes filled with the passion of the prairie poet born in Galesburg, Illinois not far from where I was born in Clinton, Iowa.  He won a Pulitzer Prize for the work.  Devlin quotes a passage from one of these volumes in “A Green Island in a Black Sea” (still unpublished).

*     *     *

Leaders who shape our destiny are explainers not orators, not complicated thinkers but people such as Carl Sandburg, and yes, Bill Clinton, who understand the heart and soul of the pragmatic American conscience. 

Sandburg’s works still sell, but he has been ignored for many years.  Others may be ignored in their lifetime but discovered when they are no longer with us.  Fortunately, we have their works.  Destiny will see that their wisdom surfaces.  Why is that so?  Because as flawed as they might have been in life they remind us what it means to be human.  They somehow managed to be genuine and authentic in that identity and reality.  Still others make a brief splash and then are forgotten because their disingenuousness cannot survive.  We have more than enough of that to go around.

*     *     *

Postscript: My first missive in the “Talking to Myself” will be on nuance leadership.  It may involve a series of such missives.

PRECIPITOUS DECLINE OF MEN IN THE DRIVER'S SEAT OF LIFE

  

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

© September 12, 2012

When I graduated from high school in the 1950s in the top ten percent, one quarter of us were boys and three quarters girls. 

When I graduated from university also in the 1950s in the top ten percent, three quarters of us were Phi Beta Kappa, Cum Laude male students and one quarter were female students or the reverse of the high school ratio. 

When I was a chemist in the laboratory and chemical engineer in the field in the 1960s, one hundred percent of us were men. 

When I was manager in the field and then an international corporate executive in the 1960s, one hundred percent of us in my company were still men. 

When I went back to graduate school in the 1970s in pursuit of a Ph.D. in industrial-organizational psychology, sixty percent of my fellow doctorate students were men and forty percent were women. 

When I returned to industry in 1980, first as an organizational development (OD) psychologist, and then as an international corporate executive, sixty percent of my fellow professionals were men and forty percent were women. 

In 1990, when I left the corporation to write books, CEOs across the nation were close to an exclusive all boys club.  Today, women head 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies. 

During my professional career, women, for the most part, no matter their acumen, academic accomplishments or expertise, seemed content to sit in the passenger seat trusting the driving and their safety to their male drivers.  Apparently, that is no longer the case.

*     *     *

David Brooks of the New York Times in his column today carries the caption, “Why Men Fail.”  Brooks writes that boys earn three quarters of the D’s and F’s in high school.  This leaves them by the time they enter college clearly behind. 

Today sixty percent of bachelor and master degrees go to women in every field, including medicine, engineering, mathematics as well as the arts and humanities. 

Men are dropping out of the educational challenge in droves allowing women to support them with the false bravado of knowing the score and having views that matter. 

In 1954, 96 percent of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked!  Today, only 80 percent of them hold any kind of real job. 

Millions of men are claiming disability and they are not even disabled, other then an inability to get off their asses and find a job.  Many who have jobs are doing poorly, complaining, backstabbing and retreating into "six silent killers" (see my book of that title). 

Men in the workforce compared to women overwhelmingly display these passive aggressive behaviors.  It is why I wrote the book.  Too often men see a paycheck as a right rather then the privilege of having a job.  This extends to believing they deserve merit increases because they need them, not because they have earned them. 

According to Michael Greenstone of the Hamilton Project, the annual earnings for median age males have dropped 28 percent over the last forty years.  Women have taken up the slack in productivity if not finding their earnings appreciating to the same extent. 

Brooks writes that women are still mainly denied the “tippy-top" positions in the corporate ladder because many take time off to raise children, but he adds, "women lead or are gaining ground everywhere else.” 

For instance, women in their twenties out earn men in their twenties, while they dominate twelve out of the fifteen fastest growing professions.

Brooks gives neurological and cultural reasons for male decline.  I see this as something of a rationalization.  It has been my experience that women adapt to change better and embrace fear and humiliation more courageously than men. 

Women use both sides of their brains, that is, both their cognitive (so called "masculine) and intuitive (so called "feminine") sides, which, incidentally, men have as well but prefer using only the cognitive side. 

Consequently, women are more inclined to be learners than knowers, listeners than tellers, pragmatists than dreamers, problem solvers than problem theorists.  Men seemingly have a preference for putting the best face on a problem before engaging it, better known as procrastination. 

Learning in school requires the need to focus, to sit still, and take instruction from authority figures.  Girls do this more readily.  My wife, BB, tells me that boys in her experience from pre-school through the early years of grammar school are more likely to be candidates for Ritalin for having attention deficit disorders.

Hanna Rosin in “The End of Men” (2012) blames it on immigrants coming to a new country, bringing their social-cultural baggage and mindset of the old country with them.  This is equally true of women, but men are more likely to resist assimilating the new language and ways.  Women, once they grasp the reality of the situation, will see that their children embrace the new. 

These mothers are more successful with daughters than sons.  Often the sons of immigrants drift away from school and into crime, as the Criminal Justice System can attest.  Moreover, my work as a police consultant (1970-1980) confirms this.

Reluctance to adapt to change is not confined to immigrants. Workers comfortable in the old ways of work are known to keep their minds in the old one.

*     *     *

A case in point.  Engineers at Honeywell Clearwater (Florida) in the 1980s were not performing well.  This prompted me to conduct an OD intervention including a competency-compensation review of this community of more than a thousand engineers. 

Eighty percent of the engineers were found to be working on technology developed after they had left school.  Taking up the technical slack were recent engineering graduates, but only at a fraction of the compensation of the veterans. 

One neophyte engineer told me that veteran engineers got to go to all the technical seminars as a seniority gratuity, and not as a learning experience.  He complained, "We carry them and they get all the pay and perks." 

To address this problem, we developed an “in house” technical education program.  Our efforts first met with resistance from senior engineers.  This included top engineering management until it was shown competency-compensation data. 

Once the program was underway, I wrote several monographs for the program, and gave a paper at the World Conference of Continuing Engineering Education in Orlando, Florida (re: “Combating Technical Obsolescence: The Genesis of a Technical Education Program,” 1986). 

Today, Ph.D. engineers in the facility teach credit courses for engineers and technicians interested in pursuing engineering or advanced engineering degrees at the University of South Florida's School of Engineering.

*     *     *

Alas, women are showing more courage and adaptability than men to change.  Women of all ages are going back to school, while men, Brooks says, are waiting for the dial to spin back to the way it was.  

Left out, what are men doing? 

Author Rosin says men are exploiting the “hookup culture,” getting plenty of sex without the necessity of commitment or romance.  Ironically, women are supporting them in this hookup culture for it allows them to have sex and fun without carrying an immature adolescent grown man as an appendage. 

Desperate to rise, women find sex without commitment allows them to focus on their professional goals.  This is evident as women lead the charge in women-owned new businesses. 

This is not the feminism claptrap or females throwing sand in the face of the ninety-pound male weakling on the beach.  Brooks says this is less about Achilles and more about the Odysseus many-sided crafty go-getter.  He ends by saying men may have to acknowledge that in the modern world they are strangers in a strange land.

*     *     *

CLINT EASTWOOD AT RNC: COMMENT & RESPONSE

  

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

© September 4, 20012

A READER WRITES:

Hi Jim,

Don't you just love inciting these political discussions? What's most interesting about these things is the volume of misinformation getting passed along as truth. Even more amusing is the righteous indignation inspired by meaningless words and actions. Was it a director's cut or slash your throat symbolism implied by Clint's gesture? Was that a sneer on his face when he made the gesture or just his naturally harsh look? I've never been a fan of Clint Eastwood or his movies. "Letters From Iwo Jima," though, held my interest. The Italian Westerns, the man in a poncho schtick, and Dirty Harry (4 of them) were examples of the "waiting for a hero" meme popular in the 70s and 80s, which he revived with "Gran Torino." He's an actor and a director. Both professions indicate he knows how the most nuance motion will be interpreted differently depending on the audience member's state of mind.  I thought f*** was implied in Clint's comments. I don't remember him actually saying it. Also, while Joe Biden did say the word, it was not "into the microphone." It was an aside during his embrace of the President, which was barely picked up and amplified to determine what was actually said. More important than any of this was that Romney's forty-five minute, non-committal speech was upstaged by Clint's 5-minute riff. The three-day infomercial (as all political conventions have become) ended with a pratfall. We quickly forget how we felt four years ago, not knowing whether we would end up in a prolonged recession or depression. The S&P was at 675 and the Dow at 6500 shortly after the stimulus package was signed. You know, the one Republican primary candidate said they created "zero" jobs. Today, each index has doubled. This means the value of big businesses has doubled. It also means big business has more money to spend. It doesn't mean they will spend it. It certainly doesn't mean they will use it to create jobs. They are not job creators. They are profit creators. Any CEO will tell you his job is to maximize dividends to the shareholders. In business, all the popular programs are designed to reduce waste (read: mistakes.) Mistakes and wasted time require more work, which requires more laborers and higher payroll leading to lower profit and dividends. The real purpose of business is to balance labor with demand and eliminate waste to minimize labor and improve productivity, not to create jobs. Jobs are only created by consumption. Greater consumption drives a need for greater capacity, which, in turn, after the exhaustion of overtime, leads to hiring. Giving more money to the rich through tax breaks does not increase consumption. The rich family will not by another car or refrigerator or washing machine or more food and clothing. Although, it might hire another minimum wage servant. Conversely, increasing taxes on the rich will not reduce consumption. They will continue to have money to spend. Middle class tax reductions have a bit more of an effect. That money will be spent on necessities. Further, government stimulus money used to upgrade infrastructure, as tax credits to retrofit homes, and other like initiatives bring people into the workforce and create demand for consumer goods. This, in turn, strains the production capacity of businesses, who then hire more people to supply both the government stimulated projects and increased consumer demand. I understand the rich like to have the word creator attached to their name. It legitimizes their god-complex. It just isn't so. We are all part of a system. The parts are not equal, but they're all necessary. Besides, I know the stimulus package put people to work. The evidence is all the traffic delays I've experienced over the past three years driving through construction zones. And, please, don't bring up Solyndra as an argument. The US invested $30 billion in alternative energy. China responded by investing $100 billion in theirs, lowering the cost of goods sold through subsidies in an attempt to destroy the burgeoning industry in the US. Michael   *     *     * DR. FISHER REPLIES: Michael, I feel your passion, and I wish I had the clarity of one party being the devil and the other the angel, but in my long life I have not developed such clarity. You can use indexes -- stock market prices, or whatever -- to indicate "progress," but I didn't see one word in your analysis that indicates we have out spent our ability to deliver, which is as true of the Republicans as the Democrats.   Everything has evolved or devolved to spin, while the safety net that we have, continues to leak, and one day, if something isn't done to change it, will collapsed totally holding nothing but air and "hope." Obama has been a disappointment to me.  His inexperience in management and leadership has proven a barrier to his ability to govern over time.  We are in trouble.  Can he get us out?  Does he have the courage to make the hard decisions?  Or is he going to continue to pander to one point of view and blame the continuing slow recovery on "big business," or the Bush Administration," or Europe? He was given a bad hand.  So was Roosevelt.  The war pulled Roosevelt out of the soup.  We have Afghanistan, which is called "the right war."  War is never right when it is not necessary.  Afghanistan is Vietnam all over again, and yes, Iraq doesn't look any better.   Courage is a rare commodity in anything, in the personal, professional, private or public arena.  I have seldom seen much leadership in my many careers.  My extensive reading informs me that leadership has been rare throughout history.  Personal leadership seems to follow this same curve.  Most people go along to get along, don't make hard decisions, find someone to blame when they don't work out, aren't focused enough, determined enough, patient enough, or bold enough to stay the course, or to get out and try something totally new when they run into a wall.  Instead, they deny the wall, make excuses for the wall, or blame others for there being a wall, and there always is a wall, for everybody.  It is called “life.”  I'm speaking of individuals, but I could just as well be speaking of leaders in my experience.  In every place I have ever been, from grammar school through high school through college and university to my many professional careers, it has always been the same.  Most of the effort is provided by a slither of the total population involved.  It isn't the best and the brightest that have set the mark on society, as Tom Brokaw insists, but the people willing to get off their asses and do something, take chances, accept defeat and unpopularity.  They knew where they were going, weren't sure they'd ever get there, but weren't going to cry in their milk to anyone that would listen if they didn't get there. I've never worked in single environment in which half or three quarters of those with whom I worked were as talented or more talented than I was.  Most of them never got out of the rut, never went anywhere, never did anything, and on occasion, I'm told, have said terrible things about me, but never to my face, not once, which incidentally, would have been appreciated for the display of courage. In one of my missives, I mentioned giving a class on "ethics and leadership" to a high school senior class of an upscale preparatory school, a school that costs these kids parents upwards of $18,000 a year.  Sad to say I would say out of a class of fifteen there were three interested in what I had to say, the rest couldn't wait to get out of the class.  An African American boy, apparently a super athlete on scholarship, slept through the class and the teacher didn't say a word.  No, Michael, your arguments as sound as they are, as much as they are based on selective information, and all such arguments are so based, will not save us from this sinking ship.  Someone in leadership has got to put it on the line and say, "Listen up, people, we are in trouble and it is not important why we are in trouble or who is the blame but if we don't get off our asses and do something about it, you can kiss our heritage goodbye!" My problem with the RNC and DNC is they seem like doppelgangers to me, both devils. Be always well, Jim PS I haven’t mentioned Clint Eastwood.  Like him or not, he got off his ass a long time ago with not much more going for him than good looks, and ended up making his day at a supreme moment in American history.  I am a philosopher that has written a minor characterization of that moment.  I suspect books will be written about Clint and the “empty chair” to the RNC contretemps.  *     *     *

  

THE EMPTY CHAIR SYNDROME

THE EMPTY CHAIR SYNDROME

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

© September 4, 2012

By now the media has typecast Clint Eastwood the fool, a stereotype of his acting roles from “Dirty Harry” to costarring with an orangutan in “Every Which Way but Loose,” underlining that description by implying he is “a senile octogenarian.”

No question he threw a grenade into the carefully scripted crowded room of the RNC.  Now the fear is that Jerry Lewis, only slightly younger, will be on stage at the DNC in Charlotte, North Carolina in his signature role as the “Nutty Professor.”

Sometimes I get the impression media is vying for comparison to the “Roman Curia of the College of Cardinals,” or the verbal equivalent to the “Spanish Inquisition.”  Not a pleasant thought to be sure.

Philosophers call the distinctly human capacity to know fundamental truths about reality from all the intellectual noise and bric-a-brac to which they are exposed to “sapiential sense” (from homo sapiens), a form of common sense.  

The database of “sapiential sense” is a dynamic interface between thoughts and things that discerns the actual in the perceived by acts of knowledge.  This is a way in which sapiential sense has a lot in common with most forms of common sense, such as intuition, right-reason, first principles and self-evident facts.

We now have a whole industry of "fact checkers" that feels it fulfills a need that is beyond the competence and comprehension of ordinary individual citizens when they hear the histrionics and bombast of politicians on the stump.  I beg to differ.  I feel fact checking muddies up the works if it is not in collusion with some special interest.  Why?  The unbiased declarations of fact checkers are forms of bias.  You cannot separate the two. 

Sapiential sense is the mind’s ability to “see” the truths that constitute reality so as to grasp things as they are in themselves.  Knowledge, not to belabor the point, is basically a matter of seeing things.  Arguments, “Monday morning quarterbacking,” as is currently the media mode, present reasoning from some advantage are processes of secondary importance.  What you see is mainly what you get as empirical knowledge kicks in.  We are wiser than we think.

Viewers of Clint Eastwood’s performance – it was a performance meant to seem impromptu, but for an actor that is an impossibility – got it!  This was not hard science.  This was a gut reaction. 

Scripted high drama attempts to approach science by capturing the empirical with the observable and measurable to fit neatly into what is expected.  The irony is that science cannot proceed at all without making fundamental assumptions that cannot themselves be proved scientifically: that is, that the world exists, that the human mind can know truth, that all phenomenon can be explained, and so on.

Why do media protest so much at Clint Eastwood’s audacity?  For most, it’s in their DNA, spelled “ratings,” but for others the absurdity is recognized. 

One television critic wondered what was the benefit of some 15,000 journalists showing up at the RNC in Tampa, Florida and mainly complaining about the heat and humidity, or Eastwood’s performance.  This critic wrote: “All this money, time and resources to watch an Oscar winner debate an empty chair seemed like an apt metaphor.  Maybe ol’ Clint knew what he was doing better than we thought.”

Deploying sapiential sense sometimes means playing the part of the boy who observed that the emperor wore no clothes.  What Eastwood did was a task that must be undertaken with complete confidence in the essential integrity of the audience’s fundamental perception of the Real and a refusal to be intimidated by the fall out and pretensions of sophists, which the media are proving to be.

Eastwood managed in twelve-minutes of stumbling patter talking to an empty chair to an imaginary friend to set the RNC on its head. 

The friend, who was alleged to be President Barak Obama, could just as well have been RNC’s presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, who was due next to give his acceptance speech, as both men have that condescendingly gracious mechanized manner of superior wit and wisdom that are meant to connote leadership, but unfortunately raise the meter on disingenuousness. 

It is clear no one is satisfied with either candidate.  That is why Eastwood's symbolic theatre is reminiscent of Samuel Beckett, the poet of the absurd.  The absurd is our most human aspect.  We are always in danger of forgetting that.  Artists keep us in touch with what is Real.  Cicero said long ago, “There is no opinion so absurd but that a philosopher hasn’t expressed it.”  He could have added, “That is why we are all philosophers.” 

*     *     *

CLINT EASTWOOD'S SPEECH AT THE RNC IN TAMPA, FLORIDA

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

© September 1, 2012

When you ask a child a question, or when a child makes an observation, there is no filter, no protocol, no scripted reservoir of correct and incorrect responses to the query or the observation.  The child speaks as the voice and rhythm of the dynamic that constitutes the child is energized to consciously respond.  Often, we are surprised, sometimes shocked and even delighted taking credit for the nascent wisdom that seems to be emanating from our congenital roots. 

That child will soon learn that what is considered appropriate and what is not, what is enhancing and beneficial to that child and what is not, and what will be awarded and what will be punished.  A child is aware of all this before that child’s third birthday because we are resolute that child should be a compliment to our goodness and civility and not an embarrassment. 

It is not the child that is the center of our concern, but how people see that child as a reflection of our breeding, our parenting, our desirability, and ourselves.  This, too, does not take the child long to perceive because before it enters preschool that child has already determined the lay of the land.

We take this amorphous mass of possibility that is that child and mold it into being an effective dissembler and prevaricator, and to understand getting ahead and getting our way are simply a matter of the skill developed in deceit and manipulation. 

The child that learns this game the best is likely to be well groomed, getting good grades in school, an exemplary member of the church and always a joy to those that feel they have bragging rights. 

It is not uncommon for that child, once an adult, and having completed an auspicious education at some prestigious university with the right complement of degrees to go into politics. 

That child who never learns the game and fights constant harassment to pay attention to grooming, to school, to church, to hanging out with other like minded respectable children, once an adult, unfinished and of doubtful identity having failed many times, commonly pursues the arts.

*     *    *

I find it amusing, predictably amusing that the Monday morning quarterbacks of the media and the political arena are aghast that actor, director Clint Eastwood, 82, would have the audacity, not of hope, but of guile to speak without a forked tongue, the tongue he received from his mother before he had to fight through the stuffy bag of pretentious society to find the rhythm of his soul.  He put that on display Thursday night prior to the acceptance speech of Mitt Romney for the Republican nomination for president.

All those wise heads of media, who have been programmed in the essence of propriety, have come down on the man with a vengeance.  How could he do this?  Why did it do it?  Who is responsible for this breach of decorum?

It has all the markings of that first time that child of three stepped out of line and said or did something that was not predicted, not acceptable and was found offensive by the arbitrary standards of those hovering big people above.

Why was Eastwood not vetted?  Why was there no rehearsal?  Why was he not scripted to say precisely what those in charge expected him to say?  How could he be such an embarrassment to Romney?   How, indeed.

Did what Clint Eastwood say hurt or help Mr. Romney?  We shall see.  What is clear is that the RNC was the equivalent of high church in a time when high church is anachronistic and the clergy atavistic. 

Some have accused the actor of “acting his age,” or being senile.  Was it a good speech?  No.  Did it get a big reaction in the hall?  Yes.  Will it be remembered?  Possibly it will be the only thing remembered of this convention.

Was it apostasy?  Was it sacrilegious?  If political conventions are high church, I guess it was.  My sense is that it is the only honest moment that I have seen in this whole entire campaign season, thus far, on either side of the aisle. 

It was a breath of fresh air to me in a programmed world that I, like Mr. Eastwood, have grown tired of, as nothing is more ludicrous than to take ourselves too seriously.  Thank you, Mr. Eastwood, for making my day.

*     *     *