Is Society Mentally Ill?

It’s an intriguing question. Three generations ago Sigmund Freud posed the same question:

“May we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilizations – possibly the whole of mankind – have become ‘neurotic’? We may expect that one day someone will venture to embark upon a pathology of cultural communities.”

Nearly three quarters of a century later, sociologist Ernest Becker speaking of mental illness, wrote:

“The great breakthrough in the contemporary theory of mental illness is that it represents a kind of stupidity, a limitation or obtuseness of perception, a failure to see the world as it is. It is not a disease in the medical sense, but a failure to assign correct priorities to the real world.”

The suggestion, implicit in these remarks, is that society is indeed sick, being simply a matter of definition. Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz asserted that mental illness, per se, is a myth that has been gaining momentum since the nineteenth century. He writes about this with reference to psychiatry:

“A person might feel sad or elated, insignificant or grandiose, suicidal or homicidal, and so forth; he is, however, not likely to categorize himself as mentally ill or insane; that he is, is more likely to be suggested by someone else. This, then, is why bodily diseases are characteristically treated with the consent of the patient, while mental diseases are characteristically treated without his consent. In short, while medical diagnoses are the names of genuine diseases, psychiatric diagnoses are stigmatizing labels.”

Psychologist Bernie Zilbergeld sees the trend towards 'shrinking', i.e., the rush to consult psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and psychiatrists, as a desire to believe therapy is the painless solution to the most pressing problems of modern life with no intention whatsoever to pay a personal price for changing.

When therapy falters, we turn to self-help books, or seek the counsel of gurus; their instant cures. When the guru disappoints, as they invariably do, we retreat into one of an assortment of obsessions or addictions, a shield from the uncomfortable reality we mean to avoid.

If these experts agree on anything consistently, it is that we inhabit an anxious age. Since we cannot retreat from ourselves, and since we clearly have no intention of changing our ways, many of us have embraced a culture of narcissism, of self-absorption, one that Christopher Lasch insists has led to conspicuous consumption as therapy for our anxiety.
Obedience Blind

What, you ask, keeps a person from dealing head on with his own demons? C. B. Chisholm writes:

“It almost always happened that among all the people in the world only our own parents, and perhaps a few people they selected, were right about everything. We could refuse to accept their rightness only at the price of a load of guilt and fear, and peril to our immortal souls. This training has been practically universal in the human race. Variations in content have had almost no importance. The fruit is poisonous no matter how it is prepared or disguised.”

We are taught at an early age not to think, just to obey, to submit to the regimented programming of society. The same message is articulated at home, then reinforced at school, in church and dutifully reinforced by various media.

The incessant barrage of acceptable ‘points of view’ and expected behaviors for every situation smother our natural curiosity. Consequently, the most unlikely person we are inclined to consult, much less trust is ourselves.

Yet, absurdly so, the authority we ought most to heed, the ultimate authority according to Krishnamurti is our own person. He writes:

“There is no intermediary between you and reality; and if there is one, he is a perverter, a mischief maker, it does not matter who he is, whether the highest savior or your latest guru or teacher.”

It may seem an over-simplification, but if society is sick, mentally ill in fact, it must be from the interplay, the conflict actually, between self-demands and role demands. It does not occur to us that the life roles we try to play were designed for another time; a time long past. While various therapists go to great lengths to expose the underlying motives for our behavior and to reveal the root causes of our unhappiness and dysfunction, this effort may be entirely unnecessary. Fortunately, it may be enough simply to examine the life role a person has assumed, and assess how satisfying, how suitable, or esteeming that may or may not be.

People often pursue professions and career paths that their families urge them to follow. It is important, we are told, that we don’t become misfits, thereby embarrassing our family. This striving to please others can result in personal tension, internal conflict, a battle between external role demands and internal self-demands.

On the other hand, if we occupy a role that is energizing, representing norms and goals consistent with our better lights, our actions will be faithfully guided by how we see ourselves, how we see the situation and how we relate to others. Our ego state of the adult, our “real self,” will be evident and the situation will be well defined, in terms of reality, and the role demands of the job at hand. This will guide us, unscathed, against formidable obstacles. In other words, we will be in a healthy state of self-realization and self-expression and thus, self-satisfaction.

However, if the role we try to play is punishing and unsatisfying, then the superego state or the righteous parent of our personality will surface. This draws out our “ideal self”, the self we pretend to be or think we ought to be. The situation becomes sub-optimal, and self-demands take precedence over the job or role-demands. This is a self-defeating, chaotic state, where confusion will lead us to aggressive and disruptive behavior.

Walking the Cat Back

There is a parallel between early twenty-first century America and the decade of the 1970s: young people being forced to participate in an unpopular war; political upheaval in the air, ruthless leaders subverting democracy (Nixon), political paralysis gripping the country (Watergate), drugs ruining lives with morality on holiday (Haight-Ashbury culture), new forms of bigotry and hatred arising, an automotive industry in decline.

In the ‘70’s, while American manufacturing entered decline, the “energy crisis” arrived; the OPEC oil embargo rocked our national confidence while a beleaguered president hunkered down and became a law unto himself. Congress, missing their cue, failed to react, to provide leadership. They refused to face the uncomfortable facts, leaving our future hanging in the balance.

This pattern of crisis following crisis following crisis, ought to sound familiar. It appears we have come full circle here in the early 21st Century.

Or have we? Consider that today we remain, as we were, stuck in the 1970s, battling the same crises, unable to free ourselves from their unyielding grip. Then maybe society is not mentally ill so much as stuck in the past, with protocols that no longer fit; no longer serve us.

“Time out for Sanity” demonstrates that we actually do now live in a continuation of the ‘70’s, not a repeat. We’re stuck, as it were. Becoming unstuck suggests an unavoidable fight for control. The key is to understand that whole societies behave much like individuals.

At the outset, one becomes stuck in intolerable situations because, paradoxically, we resist them. Tragically, the dreaded state we resist ends up controlling us. We feel we cannot let go, cannot trust, because we believe the thing that threatens us will destroy us. Only in crisis, and then only gradually, do we realize that our coping measures themselves, our habits, programmed values and beliefs, our sacrosanct ideals, alas, our control and controlling measures, are themselves inexorably destroying us. Only in desperation do we then let go.

Reaching a state of awareness, a level of maturity, we let go, let flow, only then are we able discern the shape of the enemy. This vague threat was something that simply had to be faced. There was no other alternative. Little did we know it was ‘change’ that we could face and could survive. As we let go, we see that ‘control’ naturally, reflexively, fills the void.

Individually and collectively, as a society, as a conscious social construct, why do we repeatedly push ourselves to the brink of despair, to a precipice, when our only viable option is to yield, to trust? To answer this crucial question we need to “Walk the cat back,” to retrace our steps to find that first wrong step that led us towards peril. You may recognize this expression from espionage novels. It fits our purposes here.

Time Out for Sanity “walks the cat back”, and demonstrates how we, society, have become trapped in a pit of angst.

The Manufacture of Madness

Time Out for Sanity points out that the more grown-up; the more sophisticated our electronic devices have become the more childishly we behave. We think we have conquered time but time always has the last laugh. We notice the abbreviated attention span of our children and we immediately want to designate these embarrassing states as syndromes or “disorders.”

Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), among others, have conveniently transformed our stuckness into acronyms of diseases. Trauma is the new narrative and dominates our discourse.

The influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) published by the American Psychiatric Association in collaboration with nine other officially sanctioned organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association.

DSM-IV criteria serve as virtual medical gospel for millions of professionals worldwide. It suggests an ADD or ADHD diagnosis for someone who has trouble keeping attention on tasks or play activities, does not follow instructions or complete school work, and so on. These children reflect ‘stuckness,’ more as ‘coping habits’ than mental disorders. Take away too much sugar in their diet, too much television, too much time playing electronic games, and much more family involvement and, ‘voila,’ these ‘diseases’ disappear.

DSM-IV has elevated a cornucopia of behaviors to disease status, resulting on society being stuck on trauma. Alcoholism, alone, has hundreds of ailments treated as diseases: alcohol-induced anxiety disorder; alcohol-induced persisting amnestic disorder; alcohol-induced mood disorder; alcohol-induced persisting dementia; alcohol-induced psychotic disorder; alcohol-induced sexual dysfunction; or alcohol-induced sleep disorder. Behavior is the culprit with the perpetrator of the behavior the innocent victim. Name a behavior, say gambling or promiscuity, and you have the same litany of disorders. Addiction and dependency have been rescued from self-responsibility for the actions.

Astutely, Thomas Szasz has called this “the manufacture of madness.” It implies a whole ‘industry,’ of course, one supported by a cast of gurus, professionals and their courtesans, who claim ‘cures’ through occasional conversations, or magically with prescriptions of mind altering chemicals; all industrialized solutions. What so many doctors and gurus call mental illness, Szasz maintains, are inner human conflicts manifested outwardly in ways society can’t condone, but paradoxically, nonetheless unwittingly fuels. As a consequence, addiction is the fastest growing social psychological construct with the medical and pharmacology industries, and their subsidiaries, exploding in growth.

Intrepid psychiatrist Dr. Szasz maintains that science must stand on the side of the people, of and for whom it studies, rather than being aligned with social engineers, medical professionals, pharmaceutical companies and allied advertisers who have a vested interest in perpetuating what could only be construed as a sick society dependent upon their respective services.

Of course, there are always legions of champions for these manufactured pathologies ranging from professionals in medicine, psychiatry, psychology, sociology, as well as the media and government and corporate agencies. They have vested interests in society stuck in trauma, as mental illness and dysfunctional processes provide the narrative to their legitimacy.

Irish dramatist George Barnard Shaw famously said “every profession is a conspiracy against the public.” Nowhere has this been illustrated more compellingly than the 1970s as a mirror reflection of our current times, themes, and technological swirls.

Yet, the more our society becomes focused on information technology and electronic entertainment, the more it devolves into another swirl of addictive fantasy likely to be elevated to disease status. Media guru Marshall McLuhan envisioned the space between reality and virtual reality vanishing, driving a wedge between people as persons, and into the arms of despair.

Official Maladies, Official Cures

Time Out for Sanity asks the simple question: has the world changed and have we changed with it, and if not, why not?

The book argues that mental illness is only one of several myths into which we have retreated. We have many more choices than we had a short forty years ago, but we still show a propensity for entering and staying in a very narrow comfort zone to avoid dealing with the mounting complexities of the realities of our times.

To put it another way, the chronic problems of forty years ago seem to be remarkably similar while not the same as those we face today.

As a society we continue to repeat the troublesome patterns of the immediate past, ad infinitum. Given this premise, Time Out for Sanity is the equivalent of “walking back the cat” to the 1970s to show how we continue to ride the treadmill for fear of losing control, when our plight indicates it has already happened. We are out of control.

An indication of how life follows art rather than the other way around was the television series The Time Tunnel. The machine was meant for people to go back to the past or leap into the future at will. Some tried it and got stuck in the past and couldn’t get out. The program was very disturbing to viewers and lasted only one season. Unlike the characters of this TV series, figuratively speaking, we willingly book flights into the past, get stuck in that trauma, and then seek professional help for “illnesses” that lift the burden from us by the rationale of manufactured diseases.

Dr. Thomas Szasz in 1973, speaking of psychiatry, though he could have been addressing the claimed infallibility of several other professions, said:

There are fundamental similarities between persecution of heretics and witches in former days and the persecution of madmen and mental patients in ours. Just as a theological state is characterized by the preoccupation of the people with religion and religious matters, and especially with the religious deviance called heresy, so a therapeutic state is characterized by preoccupation of the people with medicine and medical matters, and especially with the medical deviance called illness.

The aim of a therapeutic state is not to provide favorable conditions for the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, but to repair the defective mental health of the subject-patients.

The officials of such a state parody the roles of physicians and psychotherapists. This arrangement gives meaning to the lives of countless bureaucrats, physicians, and mental health workers by robbing the so-called patients of the meaning of their lives.

We thus persecute millions, as drug addicts, homosexuals, 'suicide risks' and so forth, all the while congratulating ourselves that we are great healers curing them of mental illness.

We have managed to repackage the Inquisition and are selling it as a new scientific cure-all.

Time Out for Sanity attempts to penetrate our cool façade, the trite and ubiquitous rhetoric that masks chronic problems with semantics, refusing to address them directly.

The silent ninety percent of us lingered on the sidelines in the 1970’s, waiting for the ten percent in big science and big government to deliver us. But, people forgot, big science and big government are not immune to the currents of forward, aimless, inertia. In fact they prefer the ‘status quo’.

I strongly urge everyone to stop obsessing about the future, to open your minds and find fulfillment and involvement in the present. We all have the key that unlocks that all-important door. We just have to use it. Time Out for Sanity is a book that asks and shows you the way to do just that.

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

© December 29, 2012

THOMAS FRIEDMAN, YOU'RE FULL OF COW PIES!

 THOMAS FRIEDMAN, YOU’RE FULL OF COW PIES!

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

© December 27, 2012

GRANDPA AMERICA!

When I was an executive in Europe for Honeywell in the 1980s, and we would visit Norway, where my wife BB’s relatives still name in the hundreds, I called her uncle “Grandpa Norway” because he had all the answers to what ailed society. 

Over the last decade, I have watched opinionated commentator Thomas Friedman assume the mantle of  “Grandpa America” playing a similar role.  For instance, he concluded that the “world was flat” consistent with what pre-Christopher Columbus Europeans thought only his was a digital flatness that encompassed the globe. 

He has become the darling of those who choose to be stuck in the past, as others like Tom Brokaw have championed the “Greatest Generation,” always a backward glance to the past going forward looking through the rearview mirror.  It is indigenous to our nostalgic mentality.  The only way apparently to endure the pain of going forward with the appearance of confidence is to treat virtual reality as actual reality.

It seems to escape pontificators that a debtor nation has never long remained a superpower in the history of mankind.  Not to be dissuaded, however, confidence is celebrated as the American doctrine despite the evidence to the contrary that we lag in competence. 

In standards of math competency at the high school level, Korea is first and the United States is last.  In terms of confidence, the United States is first and Korea is near the bottom.  What does that tell us?  Sadly, I believe it tells us nothing.

We have had a half-century of advocates of “self-esteem” being careful not to often anyone who appears stupid or lazy or self-indulged or addicted to some manufactured disease by the American Psychiatric Association. 

Behaviors have become a cornucopia of syndromes, which is a polite way of saying those so addicted are not responsible because the offenders have no control over the "disease."  They are conveniently victims of such “diseases,” thus exonerating them from having made poor choices.  "Circumstances" are responsible for their condition.  This lets them off the hook of being responsible for the stupid behavior that led to the "disease." 

We have a whole society that has perfected the excuse syndrome to perfection.  As a consequence, anyone who would suggest that such an inclination is wrong if not stupid (I love using that word because language has been so euphemized), or would have the audacity to use a pejorative or expletive to describe the behavior would be tantamount to heresy.  Moreover, it would be blasphemous to suggest Americans were looking for a free lunch and were free loaders.  We like to hear we are a nation of hard workers when many of us are actually foot draggers not hard chargers at all.       

So, you ask, where does Grandpa America come in?

For the past decade, I’ve read his columns and some of his books, always exasperated in the end because they seem to make such sense when they are literally poppycock. 

Meanwhile, he is the darling of The New York Times, New York literary society, as he speaks the same doublespeak as others such as Charlie Rose, et al.  They allow such timid voices as David Brooks to interrupt their soliloquy occasionally, but nobody is really listening.  It does make the liberal establishment feel democratic and altruistic for allowing them to parrot their sentiments. 

The cable networks are strange societies of celebrity entertainers masquerading as journalists.  Fox and CNN are equal comfort zones for obligingly skewed audiences to the far right and far left, elevating common occurrences to "breaking news."    Hyperbole has found a home.

Liberals turn to CNN and conservatives turn to Fox hearing precisely what they want to hear while forever being stuck in views that no longer either serve liberals or conservatives.

But I wander. In this Thomas Friedman column, Grandpa America is telling Republicans what is wrong with their party, and why they lost the last election, and what they should do about it.  This is really crazy.  Here is a proposed rescue strategy for Republicanism when he would just as soon see the party go over the cliff that is now shaping up for the Obama administration.  Erasmus would see this as a “praise of folly,” but it is much more personal than that.

MANIA FOR THE QUICK FIX

The mania for the quick fix is not new, but has accelerated since the last decade or so with the electronic boom.  Grandpa America has climbed on to this missile and now soars with it in a new career.  He deduced that America was stuck on a lot of things but failed to understand it was stuck on the present.  We have lost the meaning of time, the importance of sacrifice, the necessity of grinning and bearing it, the inevitability of stumbling, and the constant need of picking ourselves up because it was not the responsibility of anyone else to do so. 

Instead, Grandpa America celebrates the “Relaxation Revolution,” a sensual insurgency, a living self-indulgency without pending consequences, a permanent coffee break while the rest of the world carries our note, and puts us in a coffin. 

A high school in one of the most liberal states in the union has a high school in which 75 percent of the students have cell phones, and nearly a 100 percent of the students are below the poverty line, while the school struggles to get above a “D” rating. 

Phones in the pockets of everyone have transformed responsibility from us to a new kind of degeneracy, a kind of infant dependency in which the state has the responsibility to manage our lives, which is ultimately a form of dictatorship.  But is anyone noticing?

An army of self-help gurus follows the dictates of Grandpa America everywhere advising grown ups how this newest gadget age shall become their ultimate salvation. 

Lost in this is that the more grown up our gadgets the more childish we all become.  We brag about children still in the crib who can use these devices, and they can, because the devices spawn the infantile, the coddled, and the look, point and click generation.  Also lost in this is the more infantile we are the more we are stuck in the present. 

Grandpa America is scolding the Republican Party for paying attention to the Tea Party that wants us to behave as grown ups, pay our bills when they are due, live within our means, not make apologies for people who want to be carried but are put to work or put out to pasture by the choices they make. 

If people want to kill themselves with drugs or drink or gambling or promiscuity or some other addiction, the Tea Party is saying, “it is not our problem.”  Why?  Because it is not. 

People don’t grow up if they don’t have to, and when they don’t have to, the nation that spawns them will pay the ultimate price.  History like nature has no conscience.  Are these Tea Party people terrible for wanting us to get our house in order, and for people to get off their behinds and take responsibility for their lives?  No, they are grown ups acting like grown ups and asking us to join their ranks.

Yes, the Republicans lost the election!  Yes, members of the House of Representatives refuse to budge any further to what President Barak Obama says is “a perfectly reasonable compromise,” when it clearly isn’t.  The president initially proposed tax revenue of $800 billion, then raised it to $1.6 trillion, but “compromised” by rolling it back to $1.2 trillion to look as if this is a generous move on his part.  Grandpa America doesn’t point this out. 

You are always seen as the heavy, as the person who is “angry” who points out a bad trend and goes against the grain of popular sentiment, not out of spite, but out of a sense that it is both the necessary and sufficient condition to survival.

The American character has always been flawed.  Reality has never found a comfortable place in our mentality, and so it has been throughout our history.  One hundred and forty two years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:

“I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on the midnight tables (he was referring to the fad for séances), to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology (fad for linking personality traits with the contours of the head), or skill without study, or mastery without an apprenticeship.”

Shortcuts were already a national trend, which was infusing the national character, and which has since been perfected by corpocracy.   Emerson went on as if he were talking to us today:

“Excellence is lost sight of in the hunger for sudden performance and praise.”

The television program “American Idol” is indicative of this trend and this misplaced and unearned confidence, as literally tens of thousands of youngsters compete for their moment of fame without a bit of talent, and which would be an embarrassment if they had even a remote notion of reality.

I wrote in an essay thirty-five years ago before it was published:

“The president became a law unto himself, Congress stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn’t face them, and left the future up for grabs.”

Being stuck in the present boils down to choosing the comfort of gridlock to the pain of growth.

Grandpa America brings up in this piece the Sandy Hook tragedy of the innocent being killed by the mad gunman, and in the same voice, Hurricane Sandy that hit the North East.  Never having owned a gun, and not being interested in weapons of any kind, I still defend the rights of Americans to have their guns, and see no correlation between these guns and Sandy Hook.  Nor do I find a correlation with Hurricane Sandy and global warning, which has scientists divided on the issue. 

But leave it to Grandpa America to make the most of the moment correlating the availability of guns with violence, and this hurricane with global warming. 

Grandpa America fails to mention that in survey after survey gun owners are known to be the most law abiding citizens in the country; they work a job; they pay their taxes; they are home owners; they are community leaders; and they have an indigenous resemblance to the Minute Men of our American history.  Grandpa America knows this but it doesn’t gain much resonance with his audience.

If we don’t go over the Fiscal Cliff on January 1, 2013, wait until Obamacare and all these other entitlements kick in the next year, while we remain essentially a debtor nation.  What then?  For the record, I’m not a Tea Party member, and I voted for Obama in his first term, but was so disappointed I voted for Romney in this past election. 

Historian Christopher Lasch warned that Grandpa America would appear as apologist for the “Age of Narcissism,” and he was prophetic.  He also predicted the decline in the “culture of competitive individualism.”  Lasch would not be surprised, had he lived, to find a presidential candidate get into trouble for pointing out that half the people in the nation paid no federal income tax, while the top 10 percent, who already paid more than 60 percent of all federal income taxes, were expected by Grandpa America and his legions to pay even more. 

Thomas Friedman as Grandpa America is full of cow pies, and any Iowan knows precisely to what I am referring.  The common thread to his hosannas celebrating the Information Age is the permanence of impermanence as this age is totally materialistic and devoid of any spirituality.  The most obvious outcome of the Information Age, which is already apparent, is a straightforward celebration of the self. 

A psychologist wrote a book on America’s self-indulgence in psychotherapy, calling it “The Shrinking of America.”  My sense, as we become increasingly confident without competence, continue to inflate our grading system while lowering our expectations of young people, and depend more on devices to do the hard work with little personal involvement, is that this represents another kind of American shrinkage, both economic and prominence on the world stage.

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WHAT IS BURIED UNDER TECHNO-UTOPIA?

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

© December 25, 2012

Christmas Eve dinner was a festive occasion in our home as I suspect it was in most others.  The conversation was not about the joy of being together, or of meaningful experiences during the year.  It was about the latest technological gadgets and how they could do so many things, and with their many aps, programs, options, and of course the readiness of those present to display mastery of these machines.

Then the conversation, while still focused on technology, related to how a child, only four, could already do her numbers, recognize words, navigate the aps, and play games.

Then one in the group, in an attempt to be humorous, made the remark that I, meaning me, would still only be comfortable with a stone slab and a chisel. 

This was a veiled indication that my reservations about the Information Age was not only suspect, but dated me to be oblivious to the times.

To defend me, another person, said, “we are always evolving with changing times.”

It was then that I reacted, and not tactfully, to the cliché, and then left the room. 

Techno-utopia is a matter not only that I have thought much about but have committed many missives to my blog, as well as written one on the subject in a book, soon to appear on Amazon Kindle, “Time Out for Sanity! Blueprint for Dealing with an Anxious Age."

*     *     *

The January 2013 issue of Smithsonian magazine has an interview with digital genius Jaron Lanier, who expresses apostate views consistent with ones I have expressed.  He, of course, has much more credibility, as he is one of the giants of this digital age. 

Lanier, one of the creators of digital reality, desires to subvert the “hive mind,” as he sees the web world has become, before it engulfs us all, destroys political discourse, economic stability, the dignity of personhood, and leads to “social catastrophe.” 

He attacks the "complicity of the crowd," something that Gustave Le Bon wrote about some one hundred years ago (check this out on this blog).  This mania of conformity is not new.  The Information Age is simply its newest iteration. 

While the idea, Lenier says, was the belief that it would result in ever-upward enlightenment, it is just as likely that the crowd will devolve into an online lynch mob.

Although one of the creators of Web 2.0 futurism, he now sees it as “digital Maoism,” indicating that “internet intellectuals” such as Facebook and Google creators are actually “spy agencies.”  He continues:

“I think you can draw an analogy to what happened with communism, where at some point you just have to say there’s too much wrong with those experiments.”

The idea seems innocent enough, “information wants to be free.”  It is “the wisdom of the crowd."  But is it?

A confidante of Steve Brin and Steve Jobs, he has watched with some apprehension virtual reality becoming reality.

“There’s no vehicle that wasn’t designed in a virtual reality system first.  And every vehicle of every kind built – plane, train – is first put in a virtual reality machine and people experience driving it (as if it were real) first.”

Why is he so concerned?

The crowd pours their hearts and minds unto the web; they share their most private intimate thoughts, and worst of all, give up (for free) their intellectual capital for the big stars and celebrities of the medium to consume while everyone else is consigned to the bread lines. 

Who are these people?  He claims it is the middle class, which is shrinking rapidly.  Google and Facebook, among others, “monetize the work of the crowd.”

How does it do this?  It sells people (their advertiser-targetable personal identities, buying habits) back to themselves.  Lanier sees a file-sharing service and a hedge fund essentially the same exploitative systems. 

It goes back to the biggest the fastest not only being the best but also the most beneficial when this is seldom the case.  What it does mean is that the biggest computer can analyze everyone's data swiftly and to its advantage, which translates into the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. 

“Meanwhile, it’s shrinking the overall economy and that is the mistake of our age.”

He goes on,

“I think it’s the reason why the rise of networking has coincided with the loss of the middle class, instead of an expansion in general wealth, which is what should happen.  But if you say we’re creating the information economy, except that we’re making information free, then what we’re saying is we’re destroying the economy.”

He sees a connection between techno-utopianism, the rise of the new machines, and the Great Recession of 2008. 

“W are outsourcing ourselves into insignificant advertising-fodder.  Nonobytes of Big Data that diminish our personhood, our dignity.”

Lanier sees it also as a morality and spiritual issue as well (there is another article in this issue about the newborn: “Born to be bad?” This covers the new science of morality). 

[An aside: I could see it around the dinner table on Christmas Eve.  The young people at the table have little interest in the true Christian meaning of Christmas, while the adults seemed more preoccupied with talking about making money or about the newest big cars, material things.]

The digital genius continues:

“The problems with techno-utopians are not just about the crashed economy, but that they’ve made a joke out of spirituality, and worshiping, the Singularity – the Nerd Rapture …(it is) the belief that increasing computer speed and processing power will shortly result in machines acquiring artificial intelligence, consciousness, and that we will be able to upload digital versions of ourselves into machines and (thus) achieve immortality.”

Perhaps the most interesting point Lenier makes, which resonates with my writing is that of the irresponsibility of the age, the failure of the nanosecond generation to face growing old and therefore the need to grow up to accept these primary conditions of life, which are the inevitability of pain, the necessity for struggle, and the vital importance of failure in a meaningful life.

To avoid pain is to retreat from life.  To circumvent struggle is to remain in a vegetated state.  And to not embrace failure is never actually to experience success.

The Web 2.0 creator has a slightly different take on this.  To be obsessed with technology and its elaborate tool kit is “to forgo taking responsibility, saying, ‘oh, the computer did it not me’.”  The loss of the middle class, 'oh, it’s not me.  The computer did it'.”

He then goes into the cruelty and anonymity of networking outlets that surreptitiously have been known to destroy people’s lives.  It is what Gustave Le Bon called “the psychopathology of the crowd.”  Lenier again:

“We have economic fear combined with everybody joined together on these instant twitchy social networks which are designed to create mass action.  What does it sound like to you?  It sounds to me like the prequel to potential social catastrophe.”

Having spent a lifetime going against the grain when the sense of the times made nonsense to me, I share his concern.  I’ve never joined Facebook or LinkedIn, but I do use google, and I do have a website, which I use to express my concerns. 

Lenier is a critic, and I think a healthy one, of an industry and a way of life that will increasingly dominate the globe more than it does today.  I am a dinosaur, and my time is past.  But as long as I have the breath of life, I will express my views.  It is encouraging to find someone within the techno-utopian sphere has similar concerns to my own.

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CREATIVE SELLING:
MODERN PARADIGM

FOREWORD

Excerpt:  "A Green Island in a Black Sea: A Novel of South Africa during Apartheid" James R. Fisher, Jr.

“Predator-prey is an apt metaphor for the business of selling.  It is not rocket science.  It may surprise you that it is more difficult than rocket science!"

That created a buzz with Devlin’s audience.  He continued saying that the predator-prey is the counterpoint of the seller-buyer dynamic where the flux is constantly shifting from predator to prey and for seller to buyer, and vice versa, unlike the irrefutable consistency of the laws of nature. 

 “As each of us has a constant warfare between predator and prey instincts in the choices we make, there is a similar shifting of predator-prey within each buyer and seller as well as between them.  Should the prey of either buyer or seller show itself, the predator instinct pounces on its prey at that moment to master the contest.

“It is a jungle, my friends, and operates precisely as does the jungle of our animal cousins.  The hunter and the hunted are involved in the dynamic, and so it is with us all.

“ If we can calm our demons, and accurately calculate predator-prey instincts, the two parties can reach a common ground benefiting both.  Conflicts within and between predator-prey dissolve, as things are seen in the same light.”

Creativity and confidence ebb and flow as we cycle between self-creation and self-obstruction.  Chances are, we are always somewhere on this continuum.  Confidence is a self-control mechanism that comes into play to put the mind in concert with the will, so that self-creation triumphs over self-obstruction.

Nowhere is this more dramatically demonstrated than in sales.

OVERCOMING OUR CONDITIONING

Our habits of thought and education place the emphasis on analysis and judgment at the expense of design and creativity.  We pride ourselves on our critical skills, which deal with what is known, the antithesis of creative thinking — not allowing ourselves to be surprised with the opportunity to learn something new.

Instead, the sales person launches into action as though heading for a college final examination; loaded for bear, with an arsenal of arguments for overcoming objections, disincentives to delay, and rehearsed closings, having no concept of the buyer’s needs or problems, obsessively determined “to make the sale.”

Yet, we cannot be in control, much less confident and creative, if we do not embrace the enduring conflict between buyer and seller.  It is the obstacle; and it's not "out there".  It represents a gap between perspectives that must be traversed, to a plane of equals. Otherwise, competing values will sabotage progress beyond the predator-prey dichotomy.  It is an essential step for achieving constructive two-way conversation, where mutual respect and understanding foster cooperation.

THEATRE OF COOPERATION

Within this theatre, the leading roles are played out.  The resultant dialogue determines many things, including whether you are buying or selling, whether you have something of value for the other, or he or she convinces you that you do not.  In this context, every sales conversation has a successful outcome.

In this era of the world-wide-web, many business people do not believe this; do not believe in the value of personal selling. But in truth, as seductive as the Internet may be, over 80% of all business transactions are still conducted directly, person-to-person, business-to-business.

When accomplished professional sellers make it their business, invest their energy to become students of their customers’ business; they become de facto partners with those businesses.  They see clearly what their clients need, and why, then guiding those self-same customers respectfully along a path, until those needs are equally apparent to the customer.  That takes confidence, mutual respect and creativity.

CUTTING THROUGH CONFLICT AND NAVIGATING THE SALE

Creative Selling is dedicated to managing conflict by employing confident selling strategies; right brain approaches.  Although customarily less prevalent in sales than left-brain thinking, it is nonetheless the path to creative selling.  Thinking that originates from the right brain is receptive, conciliatory, responsive, cooperative, intuitive (affective), synthesizing, conceptual, non intimidating, inclined towards the social or soft sciences and spiritual or mystical.  Right brain thinkers are known as feelers, conscious of the environment with everything in it speaking a silent but provocative language.

Thinking that originates from the left-brain is insistent, aggressive, competitive, rational (cognitive), analytical, intimidating, often ruthless, inclined towards the physical or hard sciences, materialistic and cynical.  Left-brain thinkers are known as concrete thinkers, self-conscious to a fault, but unconscious of their environment, which is taken for granted.

Since creative thinking is conceptual and nonlinear, it tends to be holistic or systemic, but can be provocative and sometimes contradictory, as it pursues the mental geography of the unknown, but knowable.  Creative Selling is likely to be a departure from the expected.

Cutting through the natural wall (i.e., conflict) between buyer and seller may be likened to negotiating the darkness without the aid of night vision goggles, but with the aid of intuitive confidence. 

Critical thinking can erect barriers that aren’t there and then attempt to avoid these fantasy obstructions.  Creative thinking studies the terrain (the buyer’s situation) to understand if real or imagined barriers exist and then to act accordingly.  It is the difference between arrogance (I have the answer!) and intuition (I sense a problem!).

Intuition is not unique, everyone has this sensing capability; nor is it the opposite of logic.  It represents the complement of left-brain analysis with right brain conceptual discernment.  It is the creative selling process. 

Intuition makes information available to us when we need it, and uses any and all available means to advantage.  It does this by dissolving our self-doubt and cutting through any mental blockage that distorts our ability to see the situation clearly.

Our inherent intuition is capable of being aware of everything in the customer environment as a place is felt before it is perceived.

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Cognitive biases shaped by hidden fears and negative experiences may block out such perception.  If we accept our human shortcomings, if we let our reptilian brain function, our intuition will soar and insight will penetrate the blockage.  The problem is not intuition; the problem is we don’t trust our insights afraid to take the risks warranted. 

When we deny our cognitive biases, the subconscious can have a stranglehold on our minds.  As a result, we feel unable to act, or unable to act wisely.  Unconsciously, our old programming of fear-based decision-making tends to negatively shape our lives to undermine personal progress.

LIVING IN ALIGNMENT WITH CREATIVE CONFIDENCE

For our minds to be aligned, we must be in charge, which represents a shift from intuitive blocking to intuitive enhancing awareness.

Awareness is a matter of consciousness.  Consciousness breaks down to (1) the subconscious mind, (2) the conscious mind and (3) the super conscious mind, or in popular culture, the body, mind and spirit.

The super conscious mind and subconscious mind are driven by experience, the geography we carry with us wherever we go.  It is the psychology that operates between the buyer and seller in sales, which fuels competing or possibly antagonizing perceptions of the world. 

The conscious mind is a roving mind with a prehensile awareness of the situation.  Like an athlete, who moves without thinking, the conscious mind has no memory.  It simply is. 

The super conscious mind is reptilian.  It is gut level awareness.  The subconscious mind contains fight or flight information relative to survival.  The conscious mind contains no memory, knows nothing, but is agent of the free will, and therefore may confront or retreat.  All are in play in sales calls.

The conscious mind is relational and operates like a motion picture in your head with flickering on-again and off-again lens, which compute with images, meanings, and movements.  These can be spliced like film and replayed in another form.

My grandson recently told me of his uncle, who owns a scooter shop, “When uncle Mike is in a good mood, he sells a lot; when he is in a bad mood, he doesn’t sell anything.”  He was expressing the multi-levels of the mind in play.

RIDING THE CURRENTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

My son prides himself on being rational.  He doesn’t see himself as being plagued by wide mood swings, yet the dominance of the subconscious mind in his attitude is apparent.  The more loving and super conscious your view, the more accurate your intuition on the conscious level.  Change your views; your attitude, and your perceptions will change, which leads to a more self-enhancing intuitive world.

When the mind turns to love, caring instead of fear, intuition occurs naturally.  Creativity flows, detached from worry, freed from self-consciousness or left-brain dominance.  We escape the shoulds and should nots to give ourselves permission to love what we do.  We are less driven but accomplishing more because we are listening to the super conscious mind that is telling us to slow down, let go, let flow, and let our intuition take over.  Paradoxically, that is when we accomplish more.

Creative Selling rides the currents of consciousness, descending into lower then ascending into higher levels of consciousness, as circumstances seem prudent.  We materialize and dematerialize, manifest and dissolve, involve and evolve in a typical day.  You don’t think so?  Consider the times in a day that you space out, your mind wanders, then suddenly comes back just as you are entering the driveway to your home.

Indeed, during a sales call, we can rock into clarity, then confusion, plunge into apathy, recover our specific purpose, and then expand into waxed eloquence.  We do this as the tempo and temperature rises and falls as our conscious mind processes information.  Should the customer, turn his seat around to show you his back, and commence clipping his nails, we may suffer a panic attack, or allow our subconscious mind to kick in, which finds us saying, “Clearly, this is a bad time.  I’ll set up another appointment with your secretary.”  Then before the customer can react, we are gone.  Intuition found us in survival mode with our circuits open with us in charge by doing a hasty retreat to regroup and challenge on another day.  The omen here is always respect yourself and allow no one to violate that self-respect.

With confidence, our personality can filter all the congruent data in real-time with synchronicity and natural efficiency.  If we trust the endings and beginnings of our sales efforts, what transpires in between will sponsor intuitive confidence and creativity.  How so?  Consciousness guides us through our major and minor goals so that each call is a measure of success to an ultimate sale.

RUNNING ON EMPTY

What we see in our mind’s eye is what we are.  It is the descending phase of the creative cycle if there is no sense of accomplishment at every sales call.  We must never be stuck on “must have.”

When obsessed with a sale in which the groundwork is missing, it is likely that our energy is consumed, our confidence wanes and our creativity deserts us.  We are running on empty.  It is a state we all experience.  But, alas, we fail to realize emptiness is liberating.  Our culture places a negative value on emptiness whereas Buddhists consider it divine.  Why?

It is the welcoming phase of the creative cycle.  We backtrack from our debilitating loss of direction and inability to sleep.  Energetically dead, running on empty, we stop; we let go; we let flow.  We take the pause that refreshes, a “time out,” and regroup.  It is now okay to not do or not do right now.  It is okay not to think. 

A strange thing happens, I know because I have been there, not once but several times in my life.  These are called “watershed moments.”

Each time the world looks so black that we think our life is over, each time we tell ourselves (as a cop out) we weren’t cut out for this kind of work, each time we step back in retreat with no idea why or what is to come, that spring that we thought had dried up is found to be overflowing with possibilities. 

Krishnamurti says,

When you cease to think, to do, and to form complex plans and simply let go, being is immediately present. 

He also says:

In oneself lies the whole world, and if you know how to look and learn, then the door is there and the key is in your hand.  Nobody on earth can give you either that key or the door to open, except yourself.

The problem is that we get caught up in chronological time when the only real time is psychological time.  By opening ourselves to reality, to what is, we immediately feel our super conscious turning the unknown into the known.

Psychological time gets under the, “Yes, buts” to unlock what may be blocking our success whatever the field of endeavor that shadows our experience.  It is in that black bag that our feelings are stashed that often blocks the door Krishnamurti describes.

Creative Selling is a personal journey, a hero’s journey, as well as mainly a counterintuitive departure from sales and motivational literature, developing conventional themes in unconventional ways, along with case histories that illustrate the partnerships that are the natural connection between buyers and sellers.   

Intuition is fluid but highly personal. Our minds are open and relaxed; our character comes to the fore trusting and sincere. Our emptiness is filled with everything around us, as we are super conscious.  We still use but have escaped the limitations of the square world of logic and its obsession with ends.  We are connected through confidence to our creativity.  This allows us to be listeners instead of tellers, learners instead of knowers, open to new experience and new knowledge.  We are ready for Creative Selling.

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

© December 10, 2012 

WHY WORK ISN’T WORKING LIKE IT USED TO

We have been flummoxed by the present turning into the future without warning.  A spate of books a score of years ago attempted to ease our discomfort by explaining the contradiction away.  We read Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock” and Dennis Gabor’s “Inventing a Future” and Barbara Ward’s “Lopsided World” and C. P. Snow’s “Two Cultures.”  These were just the reasonable books, but nothing changed. 

To be fair, they described the fundamental dislocations of society, but failed to increase our understanding of where we were, how we got there, and why we wanted to go in one direction, but ended up in another.  “Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches,” also published a score of years ago, attempted to address this conundrum.  The book was called “angry,” but still was reviewed positively by such publications as Industry Week (named one of the ten best business books of 1991), The Business Book Review Journal (one of the four major works of 1991 in its category), and NPR radio’s All Things Considered.

Work Without Managers suggested that the Industrial Revolution stopped in 1945:

A shocking look at American business; why it operates in ‘1945 nostalgia,’ as six silent killers threaten to destroy it; and how only American Leadership can still save the day!

About the same time, control theorist Russell L. Ackoff was proposing that the world was going through a Second Industrial Revolution.  He writes:

Since World War II, we have entered into a period, which will be to the future what the Renaissance was to the past.  We have moved into a new age that is fundamentally different from the age, which we have come, an age that began with the Renaissance and ended essentially with World War II.

This fits with sociologist Pitrim Sorokin’s hypothesis.  He published Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937) three quarters of a century before Ackoff presented his thesis, arguing that we were at the end of a 600-year Sensate Day. 

This Sensate Day commenced with the high Renaissance of 1500 in Italy and ended with the First Industrial Revolution.  It is now in Ackoff’s Second Industrial Revolution and Sorokin’s 600-year Ideational Day, which is the culture of the creative tomorrow.  The two men view the phenomenon with similar eyes but different nomenclature.

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We are leaving the Machine Age of hardware and entering the New Machine Age of software, robotics and cyberspace.  Workplace behavior and the problem solving is prime territory for an organizational development (OD) psychologist especially in these times of cultural change. 

The New Machine Age hasn’t so adroitly departed from reductionism, the point of view that holds that the correct method to understand phenomena is to reduce them to their component parts.  OD is more holistic and functionalistic as well as phenomenological, which is a method of inquiry based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events, as they are perceived.   That has been my approach in Work Without Managers.

Reductionism, which has been popular for more than a century, broke everything down to its elemental forms: atoms in physics, cells in biology, indices in economics, and Freudian atomistic elements of personality (id, ego and superego) in psychology or psychological problems to behaviorism in B. F. Skinner’s stimulus and response terms.   

Reductionism has been modified or abandoned in these disciplines in the Second Industrial Revolution.  Yet, our cultural perspective is still essentially governed by reductionism, and is much in evidence in our seductive attraction to simplistic solutions to complex problems.  It is why management in the workplace is so often out of sync with the times.

Logic ruled in the Machine Age Thinking:

If “Y” causes “X,” then we don’t need anything else to explain it because the explanation is complete.  If “X” is necessary and sufficient to cause “Y,” then nothing else matters. 

Despite reductionism failing us again and again, its explanatory model has held fast.  We see this in the latest American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual (December 2012).  For example, Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism, is dropped, not from new scientific brain chemistry or neurological discovery, but simply as a new classification.

During the First Machine Age, the concept of environment (climate) and culture was considered irrelevant.  It was a “closed system” of unchanging laws that dictated the structure and function of a world, which was reduced to parts, and then these parts were explained as to how they came together.  We came to understand and to be limited by the persuasion that the whole could never be greater than the sum of its parts. We now know that is not true.

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Machine Age thinking also relied on a process called “analysis,” which was also governed by reductionism.  To explain something, it was reduced to its elemental parts.  These parts were analyzed, and then reassembled to its ultimate components.   Consistent with linear logic of Socratic thinking these components were then explained in the context of the problem.  Management called it “cutting the problem down to size,” while psychologists reduced the structure of behavior to the phenomena of syndromes.

Unfortunately, most problems don’t respond to this breakdown because of complexity and symptoms underlying processes.  The result is that the problems solved are not always the problems faced.  This can lead to paralysis of analysis with the actual problem lost in the process.

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This can get a little dicey with the process of breaking down work into jobs and then reassembling the work performed by these jobs into expected and achieved “results.”  On paper expected-achieved results match, but in reality there is more often than not a mismatch.  It is a timely exercise without redeemable justification.

Take the Machine Age idea of “Management by Objectives.” (MBOs).  Peter Drucker, a master of reductionism, designed MBOs as a way to realize rationally ordered corporate goals.  His intensions were noble, but the practice swiftly was reduced to a ritualistic exercise. 

This has happened to many other well-intentioned corporate practices designed for a factory-oriented society of the First Industrial Revolution.  Take the Performance Appraisal System (PAS) with the role of management and chain-of-command separate from professionals in a labyrinth of cubicles.

From the mid-twentieth century on, new ways were percolating as to how to assess this changing workforce and gauge the problem solving.  These included the value of symbols, communications, and cybernetics, the place of control theory in operations, and the idea of “a system,” which provided a template for these previous theories.

Since OD is functional and holistic, it resonates with a systemic approach to problems in organizational behavior, as Work Without Managers is organized to show. 

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We are still committed essentially to Machine Age thinking and reductionism, but in a rather more vigorous way.  The system is a reductionistic phenomenon, as it consists of a collection of elements (departments, divisions, functions, technologies), which must satisfy three conditions according to control theorist Russell Ackoff:

(1) The performance as a whole is affected by every one of its parts.  That is a basic characteristic of a system.  If you think of a corporation as a system, this means that every department (division, technology, function) can affect the performance of the corporation.  That is the first condition of a system.  If you have a department, which has no effect on the performance of the corporation, the one thing you can be sure of is that it is not a part of the corporation.

(2) A second characteristic of a system is that the way that any part affects the whole depends on what one other part is doing.  No part of the system has an independent effect on the whole.  What this says is that the way marketing affects corporate behavior depends on what other departments do, and visa versa.

(3) Now the third condition is the most complex.  If you take these elements (components) and group them in any way, they form subgroups.  These subgroups will be subject to the same first and second conditions as the original elements were, that is, each subgroup will affect the performance as a whole and no subgroup will have an independent effect of the performance of the whole.  It is in the difference between an indivisible part and an indivisible whole in which the roots of the Intellectual Revolution lay.

Systems Thinking is the new approach to the problem solving.  It means moving from a preoccupation with the parts of which things are made to a new concentration on the whole and on the wholes of which they are a part.  This represents a shift from analysis to synthesis.  

With analysis, if you wanted to explain a problem, you took it apart, explained the parts, then put it back together again, explaining the problem in terms of the parts. 

In synthesis, if you wanted to explain a problem, you did exactly the opposite.  You didn’t look at the problem to be explained as a whole to be taken apart, but as a part of a greater whole.  You explain the whole of which it is a part, and then extract an explanation of the thing you started with from an explanation of the whole.

If this sounds confusing, it is only because it is counterintuitive thinking, which often comes into play in OD work.  Ackoff again comes to our aid:

If you consider a system and take it apart to identify its components, and then operate those components in such a way that every component behaves as well as it possibly can, there is one thing of which you can be sure. 

The system as a whole will not behave as well as it can.

The corollary is this, if you have a system that is behaving as well as it can, none of its parts will be.

Imagine the power of counterintuitive thinking.  It is nullifying the practice of interdepartmental competition and alerting us to the synergistic power of cooperation. 

It is implying that the drive for excellence by comparing and competing, which is to say imitating excellent companies, is counterproductive.  More importantly, it is telling us it won’t get the enterprise where it wants to go. 

It is also providing unassailable evidence why work isn’t working like it used to.  Counterintuitive thinking may not have been critical to Machine Age thinking, but is essential to Systems Thinking in the Second Industrial Revolution.

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Ackoff’s theorems have special significance to Work Without Managers.  In my more than forty years working in and acting as consultant to corporations at every level of organization on four continents, I have found the absence of control theory of debilitating consequences.  In this original work (1991), I wrote:

Take Corporate America.  Any large company today is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation.  The pendulum of centralization-decentralization is more a yo-yo contest with no clear winners, only painfully confused losers.  Trauma is written on the face of American enterprise.  Meanwhile, this once powerful and energetic nation doesn’t seem to know what is happening.

Were it only possible to declare that Corporate America has changed, but as you read what follows, you will see it has changed little.  The workforce has gone from brawn power to brainpower, from blue to white collar, from managers to professionals, from assembly lines to software manufactured products, from brick, mortar and steel institutions to online universities at a fraction of the cost of higher education, from distinctive technological disciplines to complex hybrids, and from hierarchies and position power to Skunk Works and knowledge power.   

As you read, you will see how the failure to embrace System Theory continues to throw Corporate America off its stride, and thus every worker. Think of how you can apply the lessons learned here to your job, and by extension to operations in general.  The first step is to take charge of your work, which is the best way to take charge of your life.

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

© December 10, 2012

Tampa, Florida