DR. FISHER'S EARLY MORNING RANT

EARLY MORNING RANT – VIDEO OF ARGENTINA’S DECLINE OVER THE PAST 100 YEARS




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

© January 27, 2013

Reference:

There is a video slide slow circulating on the web, which shows how Argentina went from being competitive with the United States 100 years ago to its present indigent state, and how trying to tax its way into a healthy economy has failed.

Not surprising, there has been a lot of discussion on how that could happen to the United States, or why it could never happen here. Both discussions are of thoughtful people who care, and are expressing their honest concerns and/or views on the subject.

And yes, violence and gun control has surfaced as well as an adjunct to these discussions. Given this, and because I started this early in the morning, when my old mind is somewhat fresh, and as combative as it is likely to get all day, I let it rip, knowing it is only my point of view, and no other, but not knowing if it has any value to anyone else.

Asking the Right Question

Is the right question: how do we take guns -- in this case assault weapons -- out of the hands of Americans? I say that is the wrong question. The right question is why are so many Americans killing each other with guns?

It isn't the kind of weapon. It is what drives so many Americans to use this nonsensical act of violence to expiation their rage?

I've never owned a gun; never fired a gun until I was in the military, and then not very well. I am the exception. My son owns every conceivable kind of gun you can think of, and owns a piece of real estate in the wild where he likes to go off and fire his weapons, why, I don't have the foggiest notion. He never saw a gun at home, never heard me talk about guns, but there you are.

I don't care if Americans have five guns per individual. It is part of our persona. In New York State in the Revolutionary War, a squadron of British soldiers was dispatched to a country settlement to secure it for the British. All that returned were their horses.

This mentality, this violent DNA in our make up, has been part of the American spirit since the Pilgrims. Europeans, and yes, the Japanese, thought Americans were soft and too addicted to their comfort to be fighters. Americans were called "doughboys" in WWI as a derogatory sobriquet.

The Great Divide between Moral and Physical Courage

If you read on that war, or WWII, you'll see there are no better fighting men on the planet. I have read, perhaps you have as well because I know you are quite a reader, that ordinary farm boys discovered they "liked" war. It was like giving them permission to expatiate their demons by killing. This is not very health, and health is what I'm driving at.

My da was fighter, never knew a man he was afraid of, but he was not the same kind of fighter when it came to the vicissitudes of life, where dealing subtly with authority and creating a persona to best achieve his aims was outside the bounds of his courage.

Instead, he was a whimperer like many Irish of his class were, complaining and punishing his family with his angst but doing nothing in the workplace about it. This gave me the license to show the other side of the coin to life. I did it for all those years in work, and now I do it as a wordsmith.

Regarding nascent aggression, something I didn't know I had, I found delight, yes, delight is the correct word in hitting people on the football field, where I was given permission to display and exercise my demons in a socially acceptable way. It sometimes scared me because it felt so good, so delicious to crush someone with a tackle. Now that is sick, and I had enough sense to know it was sick, given my temper and my size when I was young.

It never occurred to me that I needed a gun, but I can imagine a person who is living in a personal hell who has access to guns as a young and immature person can go off the rails.

In my case, I always feared, and it almost happened when I was in the navy, that that same anger would get the best of me, that it would be expressed and expiated as it had on the football field, that I would destroy somebody with my hands. That is sick. I can say this now because I'm an old man, and can hurt no one because I have the strength of a baby.

Mental Health as a Palliative to a Sick Society

What am I driving at? Mental health.

We live in a very sick society, which gets sicker by the passing day. Politicians who seem to have their heads up their asses, and I'm talking about the president on down, think taking guns off the street will solve the problem.

It would appear that they think they can make us like Europe, jumping through hoops, like Europeans have always jumped through hoops throughout their history be those hoops the arsenal of war lords, kings, despots, renegade gangs or dictators.

We Americans are members of an experiment called democracy, and as one reader says, it is democracy that is in jeopardy, and I wonder how many people reading his words know that he is talking to them, a Canadian no less, someone outside their purview.

My BB tells me I dwell on the same things, ad infinitum, and she is correct. I do. Leaderless leadership is one topic I have beaten to death; MBAs is another. I suspect to the point that many don't take me seriously anymore.

I do so because our education is sick and getting sicker. A reader from another planet, China, wonders why I am so hard on MBAs. I never answered them because the "China miracle" is repeating just what has put us in the soup, and God help us if China becomes as violent as America.

Again, I refer to the Canadian's incredibly salient argument on the nature of Wall Street. He says they think, bundling securities, and reselling them is dealing with a "product," when there is no product except exchange of paper. Incredible!

Existing on a Diet of Wall Street “Products”

And for this these Wall Street brokers get million dollar bonuses, these best and the brightest, who are armed with MBAs instead medical or engineering degrees; these best and the brightest, who don't know Nietzsche from Nixon, and could care less, these best and the brightest, who think they are a success because they make the big bucks, while for me they are a terrible waste of talent, and therefore quintessential failures, and part of the disease of our Republic.

For years, and it is basic to my novel (A Green Island in a Black Sea), I was part of the army of Americans sent across the globe, ordinary sorts, innocent and gullible, who carried the religious capitalistic doctrine of the United States, which was to bleed their respective lands of their natural resources and give them pennies for attention, and expect them to be happy with the deal.

We were sent out into these far off places with no knowledge of the culture, unable to speak the languages, not interested in what interested the people, but still expected them to be interested in what interested we Americans. We expected them to envy us, and want to be like us. Alas, because of this warped perspective, we expected them to emulate us to the letter.

Why are we so surprised at their built up resentment, at their palpable hatred, at their pervasive animosity? I tell you why, because we are not listeners but tellers, not learners but knowers, narcissistic to a fault, and yet, in our self-ignorance, we are always surprised by their violent reaction. When you have nothing, and little prospects of gaining anything, you feel you have nothing to lose. When that becomes a punishing mindset, you are fair bait for demigods, and you are the most dangerous entity on the planet.

We don’t need police on school campuses

What does that have to do with my premise? Mental health.

We don't need policeman on our school campuses. We need mental health professionals that are schooled in seeing any signs of untowards behavior.

I've written much about "six silent killers" of passive behavior, which I have seen in many professionals that have come into the system, and many workers not designated professionals who come out of high school, or drop out of high school, and expect to be taken care of the way they were taken care of all their lives to that point.

We have a factory mentality, a compartmentalizing of everything, and we experience this from birth to death now, as children have to have all this attention of parents controlling their every minute, and then it goes on to the factory of education, a compartmentalizing of everything, and then it goes into the job or profession, a compartmentalizing of everything, and then we wake up one day and see we are old and we can't remember ever having had an original thought or ever thinking of taking an original step that wasn't dictated to us by another.

The incredible wonder to me, and yes I get a lot of criticism on my blog for this, is that this compartmentalizing of everything has been perfected to the nth degree with these handheld devices. These are the quintessential tools of the factory mentality as placebo effect, or indeed, as pacifier.

It is early in the morning, and I've gotten many many responses to this Argentina video slide show, and it only makes me aware of how complete our cultural programming has become. It isn't going to change because it isn't believed it has to change. Am I predicting Armageddon? I suspect it will all end one day with a whimper, not a bang.

Be always well,

Jim

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ZOROASTER, "THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA," AND ME!

ZOROASTER, "THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA," NIETZCHE AND ME!




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

© January 25, 2013


Reference:

In the Temple Terrace (Florida) Library Guide for February & March, I noticed that Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil” was to be discussed. When I mentioned this to someone, he said, “That’s well beyond me.” This gave me pause. Like it or not, the existential philosopher has had profound affect on everything cultural in the West over the last hundred years, often in subtle ways we take for granted; then again in ways that go against the grain of our cultural programming.

My purpose in developing this piece was to show relevance to our lives, while recognizing that Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-1885) may offend cognitive biases and long held cultural beliefs. Remember, philosophy can be speculative and visionary in an attempt to get to the core of human truths. That said philosophy appears to have gotten as mechanistic and as objectified as science and psychology at the expense of passion and risk avoidance. Consequently, philosophy does not have near the impact that Nietzsche (1844-1900) has had, which I hope to show here.

Zoroaster as source to this work

Zoroaster (628-551 B.C.E.) was a religious prophet and teacher of ancient Persia. He is however ordinarily known as Zarathustra from the Greek. He left his home and entered a mountain cave retreat where he remained in solitude for ten years not leaving until he was 30, the same age that Jesus when into the desert for forty days.

Details are sketchy but Nietzsche sees a natural association of Zarathustra with Jesus as well as with the works of Plato. Jesus, after his desert interlude, commenced his mission, while Zarathustra after a much longer interlude, returned to share what he had learned in the cave to human society.

It is not an easy transition. He attempts to proselytize at home, and fails, descends into the valley and moves beyond with his good news. His essential revelations were in the realm of individual awareness and personal insight, reversing Plato’s valuations of the inner and outer world. Once beyond his home turf, his message spread rapidly as the new religion known as Zoroastrianism. It contrasted people of the righteous and people of the lie. Rudiments of Zoroastrianism are evident today in the three major religions of the 21st century: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Nietzsche uses Zoroaster’s partial footprint to project as a parody of similarities and dissimilarities to religious models to transcend them with Zarathustra as an alternative to mainly Jesus (Christianity) and Socrates (secular society). He has admiration for the historic Jesus, but less so for the historic Socrates.

Nietzsche hits sacred beliefs with a hammer in an effort to get the reader to think using Zarathustra as a sage with a message to the modern world. Thus Spake Zarathustra preaches a wide spectrum of ideas that include “the will to power,” the nature of “Superman” versus the “Last Man, and the idea of “the eternal recurrence,” concepts in the promotion of human development.

“Superman” versus “the Last Man” and Beyond

Nietzsche’s “Superman” has been maligned, especially as it is associated with Nazism and the idea of the “Master Race” of Hitler’s Germany in WWII. It is true Nietzsche’s “Superman” is devoid of human timidity, is unabashedly an elitist continually aspiring to greatness, never satisfied with the status quo, living a life of creative engagement and letting the chips fall where they may. A rare breed, he claims, which is nearly extinct.

Cleverly, he contrasts his “Superman” with “the Last Man,” who is a caricature of everyman, a person who is risk averse ensconced in his comfort zone, a safe hire who never makes waves, a person who goes along to get along. He challenges the reader to ask himself: which mode of existence does his life embody and promote?

The “will to power” goes beyond preoccupation with good and evil to entertain the drive to greater involvement in life that is not simply limited to motivation and behavior, but is fundamental to meaningfulness and self-preservation.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra comes in for criticism for insisting we are not all equal in value because most people fall into “rank order” of which they cannot escape, an order dominated by “the Last Man,” an order where most people find themselves gravitating towards which they subconsciously know is where they belong.

I have identified people as foot draggers (15 percent), followers (70 percent) and hard chargers (15 percent) in most workplaces. Zarathustra would see me as an optimist.

What about this “God is dead” stuff?

Most readers are familiar with Nietzsche’s claim “God is dead.” People are fixated on the idea of God when this philosopher is more concerned with the decline in spirituality.

Like many of Nietzsche’s educated contemporaries, who did not consider religion important, he did. He coupled “God is dead” with a critique of modern faith as the West raced through the Industrial Revolution and soared on scientific materialism. He saw the increasing dominance of science as substituting one self-negating myth (religion) for another myth (scientific secular materialism), seeing the latter as the worst of the two.

Thus Spake Zarathustra is a call for the rebirth of spirituality with a renewed appreciation of life and nature by preaching the “meaning of the earth.” Nietzsche saw the shift in the West from a Christian to a secular society as Christianity became more remote, abstract, insular and perfunctory and therefore disembodied from real experience.

The world was changing and the demands on people were changing but the Christian culture was unwilling or unable to make such allowances. “I counsel the innocence of the senses,” declares Zarathustra, a role he found Christianity had aborted.

God for Zarathustra had gone from God the petty to God the pitiful:

“Thus spoke the devil to me once: God too has his hell; that is his love of man. And most recently I heard him say this, God is dead; God died of his pity for man.”

God has died because he was no longer godly. The alleged killer of God, the Ugliest Man insists:

“But he had to die; he saw with eyes that saw everything; he saw man’s depths and ultimate grounds, all his concealed disgrace and ugliness. His pity knew no shame; he crawled into my dirtiest nooks . . . The god who saw everything, even man – this god had to die! Man cannot hear it that such a witness should live.”

Think of the world we live in today where there is no shame, no disgrace, no embarrassment no matter how reprehensible or counter humane the behavior. With these all gone, what matter has God?

Zarathustra also sees the Roman Pontiff retired since God’s death, but complains:

“He was a concealed god, addicted to secrecy. Verily, even a son he got himself in a sneaky way. At the door of his faith stands adultery.

“Whoever praises him as a god of love does not have a high enough opinion of love itself. Did this god not want to be a judge too . . .

"When he was young, this god out of the Orient, he was harsh and vengeful and he built himself a hell to amuse his favorites. Eventually, however, he became old and soft and mellow and pitying, more like a grandfather than a father, but most like a shaky old grandmother. Then he sat in his nook by the hearth, wilted, grieving over his weak legs, weary of the world, weary of willing, and one day he choked on his all too great pity.”

Zarathustra concludes that we are better off without Him:

"But why did he not speak more clearly? And if it was the fault of our ears, why did he give us ears that heard him badly? . . . There is good taste in pity, too; and it was this that said in the end. Away with such a god! Rather no god, rather make destiny on one’s own, rather be a fool, rather be a god oneself.”

But even Zarathustra is the end is ambivalent about the idea of God or gods:

“For the old gods, after all, things came to an end long ago; and verily, they had a good gay godlike end. They did not end in twilight, though this lie is told. Instead, one day they laughed themselves to death. That happened when the most godless word issued from one of the gods themselves – the word: There is one god. Thou shalt have no other god before me.”

The reader is left with the wonder of the meaning of night.

Pleasure and Pain and Dionysus

The unfortunate legacy of the Christian outlook, Nietzsche charges, is that we are disintegrating beings with our natural existence inherently deficient as we are driven to take revenge on ourselves and the world for our inabilities, real or imagined.

This leaves us naked and without the moral or intellectual fortitude to embrace the challenges of an increasingly demanding human existence.

Zarathustra is saying we gravitate to pain rather pleasure, apologize for our success rather than enjoy it, are more attracted to the noise of an outer existence than to the calm of an inner world, more interested in impressing than being satisfied. He urges a reexamination of our inner lives and a reassessment of our nature. He finds inspiration in the ancient Athenian god Dionysus that was lusty and sensual, or the other side of the coin of life that Christianity denounces.

Readers may have trouble, given their biases, to visualize the contrast between Dionysus and Christ. Whereas Christianity celebrates the individual soul, the soul of Nietzsche’s Dionysus joyfully participates in the sorrows of the world. We on into suffering as an end in itself, he is saying, because we take our individual existence too seriously.

He encourages us to experiment with life asserting our individual virtues and powers to see the world in fresh ways. “I counsel the innocence of the senses,” he says, which involve delighting ourselves in the world of experience, embracing new things in a quest to improve our wounded sense of adequacy, learning how to love ourselves and live in the world on its own terms.

A constant theme in Nietzsche is “eternal recurrence”: time is infinite but our energy states are finite. Freud borrowed this idea in terms of the delimiting nature of psychic energy with the caution: we dare not squander it. This underscores Nietzsche’s affirmation of life, which is a direct attack on Socrates’ claim that life is a disease.

Relishing life with pleasure rather than pain is the affirmation of life. This is not easy for us. It is easier for us to be resentful of life, to see life as a yoke we must carry, regret that we didn’t have different parents or come into different circumstances, remorse that life didn’t break our way. We are unwilling to love or be loving, but still expect love to visit us nonetheless. It is inconceivable to us to love and enjoy life for the sake of life itself. Nietzsche asserts the proper response to life is not resentment or disengagement but Dionysian acceptance and involvement.

Nature naturing, forgiving and forgetting

Nietzsche uses Zarathustra as the vehicle for promoting a loving contemplation of all natural things, as nature is the primary source of the meaning of life.

Zarathustra counsels us to forgive ourselves our pasts and engage in the promise of ongoing life. Many have said, and the prophet would agree, what is past is past, and today is the first day of the rest of your life. He counsels us to take inspiration in the beauty of the natural world, the things so easily taken for granted and that Christianity too quickly demeans such things as being “worldly.” He says,” Place little good perfect things around you . . . What is perfect teaches hope.”

Thus Spake Zarathustra teaches patience with ourselves as we are, encouraging a sense of gradual but sustainable development, cultivation and transformation. In modern parlance, he is advocating our continuous reinventing ourselves to meet the fluid demands of a changing world.

Our nature and the natural world are continuations of each other. Our only real project, which is provisional and revisable, is in practices that are refined through many repetitions. This is the central theme of success in Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outlier” (2008). Contrast this with the Christian notion that any serious past failures or contretemps can earn us infinite torment and damage, which we are obliged to learn from but never forget.

Nietzsche suggests that one can turn failure to one’s advantage and enhance one’s life by moving forward unshackling one from the past completely. He compares this to the subtle growth of love over time, implying today is the first day of the rest of your life.

Are we “the Last Man”?

Playing it safe, being averse to risk, putting ourselves in a cage of good citizenship and following the general rules to the letter rather than assessing and exploiting our own particular talents and virtues in the context of our innate character is what he condemns as the “herd mentality.” Eric Hoffer describes this mentality as the “true believer” in his book of the same name; a morality of stationary grazing animals not creatively energized human beings.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche proffers the choice we must make between the master and slave of our personality, between the good and evil of our temperament. It is likely that were Nietzsche alive today he would see us consumed with the slave mentality in our obsessive preoccupation with things that seem good but paradoxically foster evil.

Nietzsche was not pleased with his characterization of society being dominated by “the Last Man,” while he was disappointed with the interpretation of his “Superman.” He said this in an ad hominem (i.e., to the man, or personal reference) in “Ecce Homo” (1888):

“I have not been asked, as I should have been asked, what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth . . . Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause, and end in itself, is his work. But this question itself is at bottom its own answer. Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it. Not only has he more experience in this matter, for a longer time, than any other thinker . . . what is more important is that Zarathustra is more truthful than any other thinker . . . The self overcoming of morality, out of truthfulness; the self overcoming of the moralist into his opposite – into me – that is what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth.”

Zarathustra’s great achievement, then, was not making the distinction between good and evil but embarking on the process of making the discernment, then moving beyond this dichotomy. Nietzsche sees the great religions of the West latching on to moral categories while failing to examine and reexamine situations and formulating new distinctions. His morality reached a point of self-overcoming.

Self-overcoming, he claims, cultivated in subsequent religious traditions, has led to the death of God, and the current crisis in values. Zarathustra has evolved into the opposite of a moralist, such as Freud, but into Nietzsche himself and his fictional spokesman.

Nietzsche war on Christianity is complicated and contradictory, and personal. It is an attempt, in part, to distance himself from “the Last Man.” This is evident as he sees the Christian God as a projection of human characteristics outside the self, dissociated from the human power to think, to take action, and to love, all of which were difficult for him. Fear is the motivation of this projection with this caveat. Unencumbered man can exceed his natural forces by seeing himself as godlike and then he is little better than Daedalus.

At the same time, Nietzsche has little problem with Christian heroes, as he is an admirer of Jesus, the Doctors of the Church, and Jesuit priests for their self-overcoming consistent with Zarathustra. He also admits religion, Christianity included, offers a superficial vision that improves life for many believers.

Nietzsche's other influences

Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky and German composer Richard Wagner influenced Nietzsche. So did America’s Ralph Waldo Emerson, especially his “Transcendentalism” and advocacy of individualism expressed in his essay, “Self-Reliance.”

Nietzsche took Emerson’s essay on the “Over Soul” and reconfigured it into his “Ubermensch,” or his “Superman”; and used Emerson’s “Joyous Science” for the title of his book “Gay Science” (1882). It is speculated that he got the idea for the celebration of individual experience, the cyclical rhythm of time, and the idea of the death of God from Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” (1838):

“Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given done, as if God were dead . . . We have contrasted the Church with the Soul. In the soul, then, let the redemption be sought . . . The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology.”

Nietzsche’s rejection of orthodox theology found him also influenced by Homer’s “Odyssey,” Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” all the works of Plato, along with many others such as Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Rene Descartes, Martin Luther, Sophocles and of course, Charles Darwin (“Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman.”).

Affirmation of life is an affirmation of love

Readers of my works across the globe will see themes here that they have seen in my works. I am however a rank amateur in Nietzsche philosophy, but see in Thus Spake Zarathustra an affirmation of live and love that is kindred to those themes.

This work may be an introduction to Nietzsche for some readers, whereas a flawed presentation to Nietzsche scholars. I take that risk. My purpose is modest: to show the work’s relevance to everyman.

Nietzsche is often discounted as too difficult, too esoteric and remote whereas I see him as close to mainstream. Once you get past religious and cognitive biases, and entertain the ancient wisdom of Zarathustra, Nietzsche hammer can seem like a tickling feather. To that end, I wish you well.

 

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ROBOTICS AND ZOROASTER

ROBOTICS AND ZOROASTER

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

© January 17, 2013

Yesterday, I posted on my e-mail a sensible article on the sensible application of robotics to science, and in this particular case, on the robotic application to medicine.  I used the caption of my subject “Madness and Sanity, Science and Zoroaster.” 

People are always in a hurry, and complain about my e-mails and missives being too long, but I persist in writing them as they are felt hoping they will make some connection, never knowing what connection that will be, which is okay.

My hope was that in mentioning “Zoroaster” there would be some curiosity as to what this strange name had to do with anything.  I have failed.  Responses to this missive were mixed, as always, which again is okay.  My purpose was to get people to think about something they are more likely than not to take for granted as a given, especially something related to technology such as robotics without any concern about a possible downside.

BACKGROUND TO THE USE OF ZOROASTER

When I was a boy from the ages of ten to twelve, each summer I would join my uncle, Dr. Leonard M. Ekland, a professor at the University of Detroit, a Jesuit university, and his son, Robert, and go to his summer retreat for two weeks at Higgins Lake in central Michigan.  It stopped after three years because I got involved in summer baseball with the Courthouse Tigers in my hometown of Clinton, Iowa.

Robert and I were about the same age, and would argue about major league teams and players at meals to the distress of my uncle.  I say distress because one day he said, always a quiet man, that henceforth he would use mealtimes for him to acquaint us with the great religions and religious leaders of history. 

The one that has stuck with me all these years was the Persian mystic, Zoroaster.  I ran into him again when I read Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” realizing that this sixth century B.C. man had influenced Judaism, Islam and Christianity to a remarkable extent, and that what he had to say those many centuries ago has remained relevant to this day. 

We know that Nietzsche said, “God is dead,” but failed, at least many of us, to understand that he was seeing the crushing acceleration of secular society at the expense of spiritual society.  He could envision how facile the notion of selfishness, self-interest, and egoism, and their opposites, altruism and self-sacrifice would clash like thunder against each other. 

Nietzsche was a wonderer asking such questions: is there much difference between self-serving and altruism when it comes to motives.  A saint may be egoistic when he is faithful to serving God, while a hero may be avoiding a display of cowardice when he fights bravely. 

In “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” it is clear that Zoroaster hopes for a rebirth of spirituality, crucial to a transformation from material fixation to a sense of the sacredness of and the meaning of the earth.

WHAT HAS THIS GOT TO DO WITH ROBOTICS?

We keep cutting and controlling and sacrificing what shall never return for some future gain without assessing what is lost forever, that is, the ultimate long-termed consequences of this obsession with progress at any price.

Zoroaster, a man in the desert those many centuries ago, had that same concern.  We would likely think he lived a primitive existence, but we would be wrong.  He was in touch with nature and not running from it.

Thoughtful readers see, on the one hand, how these new machines are far more capable than humans and provide benefits that exceed their possible damages. 

A reader proffered the wonder of laser non-invasive surgery as an example.  Yet only this past week it was reported in the newspaper that a man, who had laser surgery on his back, gained no relief of pain, but was far poorer, and is suing.   Is this the exception?  Obviously, I don’t know.   

Advanced societies, particularly in the West, have essentially cradle to grave security now, and the wonder is whether this a good or bad thing.  For me, to be human is to be in touch with one’s nature and the force of that Free Will.  Stated another way, to be human is to know pain, struggle, failure and consequence as normal fare in a life worth living.

Another writer informs me that robotics in automobile manufacturing since 1950 have contributed as much as anything to the value/profit differential that has seen the UAW collapse from some 200,000 to 150,000 autoworkers sixty years ago to 52,800 union workers in 2011 to 49,000 in 2013.  Is this a good or bad thing?

A more basic question: what will be left of man when his actions are irrelevant?  You doubt this is a concern?  Look at young people today as they escape into their handheld devices and avoid the fundamental conditions necessary for moving from children to adults. 

What will be the relevance of man when machines do everything?  You say he will turn to creative leisure?  The evidence suggest otherwise as his orientation leans towards materialism and concrete material devices to displace his angst and not to spiritualism and abstract expression necessary to escape the prison of self.

My concern is that robotics, and our increasing fascination with them, finds us going pell-mell into the future not only with robotics but also on automatic pilot.

Zarathustra didn’t look at only one side of an issue but both sides.  Should you question where we are going, or why, or what are the long-termed consequences of such projections, you are likely to be labeled a pessimist. 

We don’t have much patience with pessimists.  We believe if you think happy you’ll be happy; if you are positive, positive things will happen; if you question where we are or where we are going, you’re a spoilsport.  It never occurs to us that in this heady advance into futuristic technological bliss that it is a form of being stuck in a collapsing eternal now.

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AUTHOR'S NOTE: Why American Can't Get Their Work Done!

Author’s Note: Why Americans Can’t Get their Work Done!

Asking right questions!

In 2001, I performed an intervention at the Children’s Board of Hillsborough County in Tampa, Florida, an agency that delivers important services to indigent children in the county. I asked the director, “What do you want me to do?”

The director answered, “Find out why we can’t get our work done.” Subsequently, I used that title to my report: Why the Children’s Board of Hillsborough County Can’t Get Its Work Done.

It was the right question. The report was a forensic study of what went wrong and why, and how to correct these deficiencies. When it was finished, however, the director was so incensed with my report she short-changed me $3,600 as retribution for answering a politically incorrect question.

In 2012, she was removed from her office and a high-octane local politician and former mayor, Pam Iorio, took over in an interim capacity, implementing many of the recommendations I made in my report. She also reduced administrative staff and field operatives by nearly one-third. Iorio has organizational skills and an instinct for doing the right thing, along with the political clout.

Powering Out

The question of why Americans can’t get their work done has been a concern of mine since 1980. Prior to that time, I operated either in the field or as a top executive, never having worked professionally in the bowels of the corporation.

After earning my Ph.D. in 1977, I consulted for many Fortune 500 companies, finally joining one in 1980, Honeywell, Inc. in Clearwater, Florida as a management and organizational development psychologist. We conducted several studies between 1980-1986 dealing with work efficiency. As a result, I identified six passive individual behaviors and three dominant corporate cultures.  In the process, I discovered many functional groups were performing at levels of organizational efficiency about 50% of what was expected.

Later, in 1986, as the director of organizational development for Honeywell Europe Ltd., the efficiency of Honeywell workers in Europe proved to be about the same as in the U.S. with clear signs of the same passive behaviors and cultures.

By 1990, it was clear to me why the United States and Europe were failing to get their work done. These observations were followed up with a series of articles and books, Six Silent Killers (1998) being the most comprehensive.

Now, in the 21^st century, with the advent of powerful personal IT devices, distracting from as much as contributing to work, worker efficiency continues to plummet. The irony is, with the power of these electronic devices soaring, individual worker efficiency is becoming increasingly irrelevant, leading to the conclusion that humans may be factoring themselves out of existence, somewhat as drone technology is in the process of revolutionizing boots on the ground warfare. Asking the right question doesn’t seem natural to us.

Right Question Overruled

In 2003, the United States in a heightened state of fear and paranoia following the New York City Twin Towers terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, the wrong question was asked of Iraq: where are the weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), when the right question should have been are there WMDs in Iraq?

Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson wrote a series of articles in The New York Times debunking the Niger intelligence claims that uranium sales were made to Iraq, which President George W. Bush misrepresented in his State of the Union address leading up to the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq.

General Colin Powell, with CIA Director George Tenet sitting behind him as he addressed the United Nations, laid out a case of Iraq having these phantom WMDs. It became a burlesque comedy of tragic proportions. Wilson was maligned, and his wife, the covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, was exposed and compromised, all this from asking the wrong question.

No Contest

Six Silent Killers doesn’t ask: “Where are these passive behaviors?”  Rather, it asks the more audacious question: what sponsors these collective behaviors and what are we doing about it?

These killing behaviors exist undetected negating productive effort in two of these three dominant workplace cultures:

·        The Culture of Comfort is management dependent with the manager acting as surrogate parent to reactive and taciturn workers;

·        The Culture of Complacency finds workers counterdependent on the organization for their total well being suspended in the terminal adolescence of the dependent child; and

·        The Culture of Contribution departs from this dependence with workers and managers cooperating and collaborating as partners in enterprise in mature adult relationships.

While the Culture of Complacency may thrive in some quarters in 2013, surely the “six silent killers” operate even more so in work cultures and industries plagued by constant restructuring, mergers & acquisitions, downsizing, and/or divisive and incompetent leadership. 

Basically, the managerial class has been waging a losing war against workers for nearly three decades, and it continues, now aided by state and federal governments. Despite apparent gridlock and dysfunction, corporate society persists in business as usual practices and in the exercise of infallible institutional authority while ignoring the mounting evidence of corporate decline in forward inertia.

The right question to ask is how much longer can the United States afford this?

Some 24 states in the United States have now passed union busting legislation, calling it “Right to Work” legislation. This has been in part driven by the impossibility of states being able to maintain the funding of their benefit and retirement plans. It is not uncommon in the State of California, for example, to retire with a yearly income (including benefits) in the range of $100,000 to $200,000. The mean average is in the range of $40,000 per year for 60 percent of state retirees, which is well above the national average of industrial retirees. Who pays for these exorbitant compensation packages? Taxpayers do! Keep this in mind.

Delay of the Game

Symptoms of the problem are evident everywhere.  Currently, our attention is drawn to the National Hockey League’s owners’ contract impasse with the players association (NHLPA). It has been finally resolved but after canceling half of the current 2012-2013 NHL season. The long-term contract should keep peace in this sport for the next eight or ten years, that is, with players and owners, but what about fans? It is yet to be learned what are the long-term consequences of this most contentious struggle between labor and management. Neither complacency nor the six silent killers are easily detected as they represent a mindset that feels it is being taken advantage of, which translates into justifying negative behavior. Little or no concern is paid to the unintended consequences.  What might they be?

The wrong question for NHL players was why did they refuse to settle, when the right question is how much longer will NHL fans be able to afford continuing to pay the high price for supporting the sport?

Owners know there is a limit to how long they can continue to sign high priced player contracts without exceeding the ability of ticket buyers to pay. Obviously, players want more revenue, and many fans are on their side, without those fans or players knowing the price of doing business other than the sport’s entertainment value. The business risks are outside their purview. Typically, professionals of all stripes, when asked about such factors as business risks, they reply without hesitation, “That’s not our problem,” when clearly it is everyone’s in the long run.

The other right question is why is there so much distrust between players and owners, workers and managers? Inappropriate questions are asked because of false assumptions.

When Greed Became Good…

During the golden era of business in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, that is, before the rest of the world caught up with the United States competitively, the differential in compensation between workers and managers was modest. The differential climbed in the 1980s, soared in the 1990s, and has spiraled beyond comprehension in the 21^st century. It is no accident that the Six Silent Killers became prevalent in the 1990s when “greed became good.”

It is the reason the “Occupy Wall Street” (OCW) movement was launched without an apparent agenda, but with pervasive frustration and confusion as 1% of the population was said to earn or control wealth equivalent to what the bottom 90 percent generated with which to live. OCW didn’t know what question to ask so they simply acted as squatters, expressing their indignation.

Another wrong question to ask is what can management do about this waste, when the right question is when will workers tire of being disenfranchised from the workplace, from the money changers, and from the marketplace?  When will they realize they stir the drink?

An ancillary right question would be: what prevents workers from growing up and accepting responsibility and accountability consistent with their interests? It is futile to look for demons.

There are no demons here, no good guys and bad guys, only workers and managers moving away from good sense and the pragmatics of the psychology of William James, where self-interest once trumped everything as it mutually served workers and managers alike.

Ultimate Questions

To put things in perspective, more than 90% of what workers demanded at the beginning of the last century – a safe and healthy working environment, pay for performance, social benefits, adequate vacations and opportunities for promotion – has essentially been given to them.

Six Silent Killers is not about powerless workers under siege using passive behaviors to justify their frustration in the workplace. Nor is it about anachronistic management, which clearly is outdated, but which, paradoxically, is supported and sustained daily by passive workers and reactive managers. Neither workers nor managers want to face up to the struggle necessary to establish a new system, which would appease if not eliminate the litany of complaints about “the system,” as well as their angst with each other. Who is the system: everyone!

Countless attempts have been made over time to encourage workers to self-manage, including putting them on salary and giving them professional status. I don’t know of a single case where hourly workers voted to sacrifice the possibility of overtime pay to work beyond their shift or on a Saturday or Sunday without additional compensation, as is the case with most professional workers.  Opportunity doesn’t seem to be enough.

The final question, which the reader might ask is not why workers are suspended in adolescence, but when will they escape this dependence, and decide to “grow up”? A secondary question:  when will workers realize they can work without managers?

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

© January 14, 2013

Edited by George Edward Daly, Calgary Alberta, January 14, 2013

THE DISSEMBLING NATURE OF IDENTITY AND ITS COST

THE DISSEMBLING NATURE OF IDENTITY AND ITS COST

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

© January 10, 2013

Strangers are likely to ask young students when they first meet: where they come from, where they go to school, what is their major, or if already graduated, what is their profession, where do they work?  Variations of these questions follow when they are older: are you married, how did you meet, have you any children, how many, what are their names, where do you live, what do you do, do you play golf, what clubs do you belong to, what church do you go to?  Hobbies take on increased significance when you are of retirement age, which are always included, as well as a variation of the other questions.  Strangers like to get a fix on us so that they can put us into a stereotypical box.  It is a form of breaking the ice, and deciding if we want to know you better. 

Strangers complement this code through their eyes studying the way we dress, the manner of our responses, the educational level of our voice and how we express our thoughts, and if we have any strange tics in the use of humor that tells them to be a bit weary. 

In my case, strangers might see me as a professor they have had at the university, which was not far off having been an adjunct at several universities, or a psychiatrist as one nurse asked me recently, who was acting as a cashier at Wal-Mart.  When I explained to her, I was a psychologist, she beamed with approval, only to have the smile fad when I told her I was an industrial psychologist.  I’ve also been taken to be an actor more than once, which surprises me.  This may because of the way I dress, which is the same way I’ve always dressed with the style certain to come back to make me look, again, in style.

The temptation is there to please strangers with answers fitting presuppositions about you.  This finds men often asked how tall they are, and women how slim they are.  Men add a couple inches, and women shed a few pounds in their answers to bring smiles of envy.

*     *     *

Author James T. Farrell once wrote a delightful story about a middle age couple returning home on the train after a shopping day trip to Chicago.  Asked where they lived, the man told the stranger in a suburb where they owned a block of apartments and lived in one of them.  The woman turned her head aside as they rented one of the apartments, and didn't even own an automobile.  Asked what he did for a living, the man said he owned an engineering company, when he was actually a plumber’s assistant for a licensed plumbing company; when asked where he went to school, having only finished grammar school, he mentioned an upscale high school he never attended.  Finally, the man asked the stranger what he did.  The stranger answered he was unemployed and wonder if the man could spare him a fiver or two.  The comeuppance worked with the man putting a ten-dollar bill into the stranger’s hands.

WHO ARE YOU RIGHT NOW?

In meeting a new person, there is a strong need to please, to make an impression.  Should that impression be negative, it is immediately discernible on the other person’s countenance long with an unconscious posture withdrawal.  To combat this, we feel we have no other option than to lie.  We justify the lie saying it is not a lie but just a harmless exaggeration, besides, what damage does it do? 

My da often corrected strangers we met while traveling across the length and breadth of the country on a two-week summer vacation pass for The Chicago & North Western Railway.  Strangers would ask him where he worked, and he would tell them.  “You’re a conductor, are you?”  “No,” he would answer, “I’m a brakeman; I worked for conductors.” 

“Oh,” they would say, looking at him askance.  Then he seemed to delight in giving them more information than they asked for, saying, “I’m not even a regular brakeman, but on the extra board which I’ve been on for more than ten years, as there is a waiting list for regular brakeman jobs.” 

On one trip from Clinton, Iowa to California, I asked him when we had a rest stop in Nevada, “Why did you not say you were a conductor; you took the exam; why all that about the extra board?”

He looked me in the eye and said, “Jimmy, what I am is an extra board brakeman.  Yes, I took the conductor’s examination, but didn’t pass it.  Did you want me to tell the stranger that?”

“No!” I said emphatically. 

“Jimmy, I love working on the railroad.  It is the best job I’ve ever had.  I am proud of what I am, and comfortable with what I do.  You are the son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad.  That is who you are right now.  The day you deny that, you won’t know who you are, and everyone else will own you. 

“Your father completed seven grades at St. Patrick’s the same school you attended.  That’s who your father is.  Your mother graduated from high school, but she has a tendency to exaggerate who she is, and about you kids, especially about you.

“She’s filled your head so full of BS that it is a wonder your feet ever touch the ground.”

Angered, I asked, “What’s that supposed to mean?”  I was twelve years old at the time.

“It means you’re full of malarkey, Jimmy,” adding, “thanks to your mother.”

I went to sit in an empty seat a few rows away I was so mad at him, tears rolled down my cheeks, clouding my vision of the passing beauty of the countryside.  How could he be so cruel, I thought.  I never had a follow up conversation with him on the subject.

*     *     *

A couple of years later, I was complaining to my mother about a coach in high school.  He rose out of his chair in the living room where he was reading The Clinton Herald, and looked at us in the kitchen.  “Jimmy, got a minute?”  I then followed him into the living room and sat down on the sofa facing him in his favorite chair.

“Have you told the coach how you feel?”

“Of course not.”

“You think he’s an asshole, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he won’t know how big an asshole he is if you don’t tell him to his face.”

“But ..”

“But what?  Are you afraid he won’t play you, kick you off the team, what?”

I pushed my chest out, and smiled, “He won’t do that.  I’m too good.  He needs me,” then less confidently, “he doesn’t need to know how I feel.”

“Jimmy, he already does.”

“He does?”

“Of course he does.  You are as obvious as a naked man at mass.  That’s not the point.  The point is to take responsibility for the way you feel.”

“How?”

“Imagine the person you’re talking about is standing right behind your shoulder.  If you do, you won’t say anything or think anything you wouldn’t say to his face.”

He wasn’t through.  “If you don’t like the man, fine.  Show him the respect that you’re a person of sincerity, have the courage not to be two faced.  It doesn’t mean you’re wrong about him.  He’s in charge and your job is to play for him or get off the team.  You don’t want to become a sniveling gossipmonger.”

The result of that advice is that I tend to be direct to the extreme.  It has gotten me into a lot of trouble.  People ask me how I feel about something, and I tell them, which is not often what they expect to hear. 

In my defense, I ask, “What about when guys spread gossip about me that is not true, what about that, what am I supposed to do about that?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?  Shouldn’t I confront them?”

“What good would that do?  They’ll deny it.  Guys on the road talk about you, some of it gets back to me.”

“About me?  Why?”

“Oh, for a lot of reasons, because coaches play you rather than their kid, because you’re always getting your name in the paper for this or that.  I suppose because you’re a cocky SOB.”

“Thanks for that.  What do you do when they talk about you?”

“Nothing.  I just listen, which gets their dander up more than if I did something.”

“Da, why do people do that?”

“You’d have to ask them.”  He lit a cigarette on the end of his butt.  “Men are far worse gossips than women.  You know this when they start talking about whoever isn’t there.  Sure as the Pope is Catholic, they’ll be talking about me when I’m not there.”

“That’s sick.”

“No, sick is when they try to knock you to your face using humor to hide their true colors.  That is not only cowardly it shows you have an advantage over them you never understood you had.”

“Guys do that to me,” I said, “they mock me.”

“I’m sure they do.” 

“But why?  What do they get out of it?”

“They think they’re being funny.  Don’t react to it; let them think they have you where they want you.  It is there way to have a sense of superiority.”

“I totally disagree.  When somebody does that to me, I want to knock their lights out, but I don’t, but I’m in their face.”

He shakes his head.  “Does it make you feel any better?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact it does.”

“Then they’ve won.” 

With that, I started to moon over what he had said.  “Mom doesn’t gossip.” 

“No, but she doesn’t hear very well.  She dominates the conversation talking about you kids, always with exaggeration.”

“Have you told her that?”

“Oh, Jimmy, how often I do.”

“Does it do any good?”

“Of course, not.  You are the light of her eyes.  You justify her life.  You are her calling and she’s determine you will be somebody.”

“How is she going to do that?”

“Beats hell out of me.”

“Da, how do you feel about that?”

“No opinion.”  

*     *     *

A few years later, we had another conversation.  I was near graduation from college and was feeling especially giddy.  “Remember, da, when I was a sophomore in high school, and you wanted me to quit school to take a job on the railroad?”

“So?”

“Then a couple of years ago when a professor wanted me drop out of chemistry, and take a position in the humanities honor program, you asked me if I was a fag.”

“Where is this going?”

“Da, why have you never believed in me?”

“Why have I never believed in you?  That is not how I see it.  My problem is knowing all the hurt, conniving and backstabbing you will encounter rising above your father.”

“You don’t think I'm equal to that?”

“I don’t think any of us are.  No, I don’t think you are.  Now, your mother has an unbelievable capacity for risk, for putting you into her fantasy world and standing tall.  She is bound and determined for you to reach her brother’s level since you were a little boy.”  My uncle earned two Ph.D.’s at Iowa in psychology and economics, was head of the department of commerce at the University of Detroit, and an international consultant, rising out of South Clinton on the wrong side of the railroad tracks.

“Well, she wasn’t wrong!” I said with finality. 

He didn’t say anything. 

*     *     *

A few years later, home on emergency leave from Europe where I was a hospital corpsman on the USS Salem (CA-139), the flagship of the Sixth Fleet, operating in the Mediterranean Sea.  My da was dying of multiple myeloma, a form of leukemia, a few weeks from his fiftieth birthday. 

From his hospital bed in our home, still able to talk, he said, “Remember when you asked me how I felt about all this pressure your mother put on you?”

“Yes.”

“I want to tell you something now.  I talked to your brother and two sisters.  I’m going to die soon.”  He would die three weeks later, January 3, 1958, three days after his fiftieth birthday.  “Your mother says you want to be a writer.  That is hard for me to see as you don’t even write a good letter.”

“Why then did a professor want me to be in the honors program at Iowa, an internationally recognized humanities program?”

“No idea.”

“That’s when you asked me if I was a fag.”

“Yes, do you know why?”  I waited.  “You and reality have always had a mixed relationship, and you didn’t even have a girlfriend, what was I to think?  You were always with your head in a book.  There is a big word to describe how I felt.”

“Ambivalent.  You felt ambivalent about me.”

“Whatever.  I have no idea what that word means.  Anyway, you played this game with yourself, and so did your mother.  Somebody had to show some sense.  That’s what I’m talking about.  Of you four kids, I’m most worried about you.  You’ve got your head so far in the clouds you can’t even see the ground.  That’s dangerous, Jimmy.  It’s a cruel world out there.  It’s a world that likes to cut people like us up and have us for breakfast, people too big for their britches.”

I started to cry.  I was a man in my twenties, a man who had already had seen a good bit of the world, a man who had a wife and a son, a man who had a professional job to return to after his active duty in the navy, a man who had one success after another, and my da saw me as a loser.

“Tears aren’t going to change anything, Jimmy.”  My crying turned to sobs, shaking with emotions.  “Here, take this.”  He gave me a tissue from a box beside his bed.  He was dying and he was tending to me.  He weighed only about sixty pounds at the time on his five-seven frame normally weighing about one-fifty.  He had bed soars on his back so bad that I had to medicate them twice daily.  Since I was a hospital corpsman, the doctor allowed me to give him morphine shots for pain whenever he needed them.  I cannot exaggerate how brave a man he was in face of death, although he could not mask the pain in his eyes.  “Blow your nose!” he said to me, as mucous covered my lips.  “You look disgusting.” 

Then he said something that hit me hard.  “Tears keep in the vault.  If you don’t, people will have you for lunch.”  It only made me continue to sob.  Then he closed his eyes and went to sleep.  Sitting on a chair reside his bed, I cried myself to sleep leaning my head against his cold clammy hand.

*     *     *

The rest of the story is that on January 3, 1958 my mother sent me to the store for some food.  We took turns monitoring him on a twenty-four hour basis.  When I returned, my mother was crying.  “What is going on, Jimmy, what is happening?”

My da was in his death rattle.  He looked at me raised his head off his pillow, and then the rattle stopped with his eyes still staring at me.  My mother was hysterical, clinging to me to do something.  I held her until she became limp with emotions, went over and closed my da’s eyes, and rested his head on the pillow, and called Dr. O’Donnell.

He was so right about me.  My mother was a disaster.  We were in our little house alone and I had dry eyes, thinking some day I’ll write about this.  I promised myself I would live the life that he did not have.  I was angry with God, but totally functional.  I organized his funeral with Johnny Dalton’s Funeral Parlor, Johnny a boyhood friend, and called Dr. Carey, another boyhood friend.  The Irish stuck together no matter their station in life.

Mass donations poured in from his railroad buddies and others.  I gave Father McInerny half of them, and the other half to my mother to live on.  Father suspected something as he expected far more than I gave him.  I found I could take his insinuations without comment.  My mother never knew that for many months she was living off Catholic Mass money.  I checked the Chicago & North Western Railway for my mother’s survivor benefits, and learned for the first time how little my da made per year over the years, and how little compensation my mother was going to get.  Those in the railroad retirement system didn’t contribute or participate in social security benefits.  She was forty-four years old.  My da only made a fraction of what I made as a novice chemist in R&D at Standard Brands, Inc.  It wasn’t fair.  It wasn’t right.

Life is always a collection of what ifs.  In my case, my da’s early death spurred me on to harness my anger to some purpose using lessons he taught me along the way.  My children, even my grandchildren don’t like to think that their roots are so common, but that is their legacy and their greatest strength.  They don’t need to dissemble, don’t need to pretend, don’t need to look life in the face and turn away.  They are real.  They have the freedom to see what they are right now, right this minute, and not apologize to anyone about it, for they are not trying to be anyone else.

*     *     *

INTRODUCTION TO KINDLE EDITION OF "SIX SILENT KILLERS" -- ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS!

INTRODUCTION TO KINDLE EDITION OF “SIX SILENT KILLERS” – ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS!

REFERENCE:

This is the first draft of what may become the Introduction to the Kindle edition of this book.  People ask me, how do you write so much?  First of all, I type rather fast, have a good idea of what I want to say, am not much of an editor of my work, and can knock off a piece, such as this, in an hour give or take ten minutes.

*     *     *

In 2001, I did an intervention of the Children’s Board of Hillsborough County in Tampa, Florida, which is an agency that delivers important services to indigent children in the county.  I asked the director, “What do you want me to do?”

The director answered, “Find out why we can’t get our work done.”

I made that the title of my report, “Why the Children’s Board of Hillsborough County Cannot Get Its Work Done.”  It was the right question.

The report was a blueprint of what went wrong and why, and how to correct these deficiencies.  So incensed was the director with the report that she short-changed me $3,600 as punishment for answering the question. 

In 2012, she was removed and a high-octane local politician and former mayor, Pam Iorio, took over her position in an interim capacity, implementing many of the recommendations made in my original report.  She also reduced the administrative staff and field operatives by nearly one-third.  Iorio has organizational skills and an instinct for doing the right thing.

*     *     *

The question of why America cannot get its work done has been a concern of mine since 1980.  Prior to that time, I operated either in the field or as a top executive, never having worked professionally in the bowels of the corporation.

After earning my Ph.D. in 1977, I consulted many Fortune 500 companies, finally joining one in 1980, Honeywell, Inc. in Clearwater, Florida as a management & organizational development psychologist.  Several studies were made between 1980-1986 assessing work efficiency.  It resulted in my identifying six passive behaviors and three dominant cultures, finding the complex organization had many functional groups performing at various levels.  At best, overall performance was at about 50 percent efficiency. 

Promoted to director of organizational development for Honeywell Europe Ltd. in 1986, the efficiency of workers was found to be about the same.  In both instances, there appeared clear evidence of “six silent passive behaviors,” crippling performance and negatively contributing to the bottom line.

It was clear by 1990 to me why the United States and Europe could not get their work done, a series of books followed with this the most comprehensive.  Now, in the advent of handheld electronic devices, which are as much a distraction and contributor to work, worker efficiency would appear around 35 percent or below.  The paradox is that as the efficiency of workers declines the efficiency of these electronic devices soars, leading to the possibility that workers will be marginalized to the point of being essentially unnecessary, somewhat as drones are changing the nature of combat in warfare, then what?  Asking the right question doesn’t to be natural to us.

*     *     *

In 2003, the United States in a state of heightened fear and paranoia after the Twin Tower terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, the wrong question was asked of Iraq: where are the weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), when the right question should have been are there WMDs in Iraq?

Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson wrote a series of articles in The New York Times debunking the Niger intelligence claims that uranium sales were made to Iraq, which President George W. Bush misrepresented in his State of the Union address leading up to the preemptive invasion of Iraq.

General Adam Clayton Powell, with CIA Director George Tenet sitting behind him as he addressed the United Nations, laid out a case of Iraq having these phantom WMDs.  It became a burlesque comedy of tragic proportions.  Wilson was maligned, and his wife, the covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, was exposed and compromised.  All this for asking the wrong question.

“The Six Silent Killers” doesn’t ask where are these passive behaviors, but the more audacious question: are such behaviors leading to our collective decline; if so, why and what are we going to do about it? 

These killing behaviors are described and shown how they fester undetected in the workplace, affecting and effecting performance and competitive advantage.  At the same time, three cultures dominate organizational life: the Culture of Comfort, which is management dependent with the manager acting as parent to reactive and taciturn worker; the Culture of Complacency, which is organizational counterdependent for the worker’s total well being, and where the worker acts like a dependent child; and the Culture of Contribution, where workers and managers are partners in enterprise, and where managed conflict not harmony is the key to the positive performance of mature workers acting as interdependent contractors.

It is my view that the “culture of complacency” may persist in some quarters but surely in 2013 the “six silent killers” operate even more so in work cultures and industries plagued by constant restructuring, mergers & acquisitions, and downsizing. 

Basically, the managerial class has been waging a losing war against workers for nearly three decades, and it continues, now aided by those elected to political office in the state and federal government, always aided by a cadre of lobbyists.  Despite gridlock or dysfunctionality, corporations – including higher learning institutions – continue business as usual practices with infallible institutional authority contributing to the forward inertia. 

The right question to ask is how much longer can the United States afford it?

To be noted some 24 states in the United States have passed union busting legislation calling it “Right to Work” legislation.  This has been in part preempted by the impossibility of maintaining the benefit and retirement plans of many of these states.  For example, it is not uncommon in the State of California to retire with a yearly income including benefits in the range of $100,000 to $200,000.  The mean average is in the range of $40,000 per year for 60 percent of state retirees, which is well above the national average of industrial retirees.  Who pays for these exorbitant compensation packages?  Taxpayers do!  Keep this in mind.

*     *     *

Current attention has been paid to the National Hockey League’s owners dispute with the players union association.  It has been finally resolved but after canceling half of the current 2012-2013 NFL season.  The long-term contract should keep peace in this sport for the next eight or ten years, that is, with players and owners, but what about fans?

It is yet to be learned what are the long-term consequences of this most contentious struggle between labor and management.  Neither complacency nor the six silent killers are easily detected as they represent a mindset that feels it is being taken advantage of, which translates into justifying the negative behavior.  Little or not concern is directed to the unintended consequences. 

The wrong question for NFL players was why did they strike, when the right question is how much longer will NFL fans be able to afford continuing to pay the high price for supporting the sport? 

Owners know there is a limit to how long they can continue to honor high priced contracts without transferring the costs to ticket buyers.  Obviously, players want more revenue, and the fans are on their side, without either fans or players knowing the price of doing business other than their part in the sport’s entertainment dimension.  The risk factor is outside their purview.   Typically, professionals of all stripes, when asked about the risk factor, reply in unison “not my problem,” when clearly it is in the long run. 

The other right question is why is there so much distrust between players and owners, workers and managers?   Inappropriate questions are asked because of false assumptions.

*     *     *

During the golden era of business in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, that is, before the rest of the world caught up with the United States competitively, the differential in compensation between workers and managers was modest.  The differential climbed in the 1980s, soared in the 1990s, and has spiraled beyond comprehension in the 21^st century.  It is no accident that the “Six Silent Killers” became prominent in the 1990s when this book was first written, and “greed became good.” 

It is the reason the “Occupy Wall Street” movement was launched without an apparent agenda, but with pervasive frustration and confusion as 1 percent of the populace earned or controlled the wealth equivalent to what the bottom 90 percent shared as their own.  OCW didn’t know what question to ask so they simply acted as squatters. 

Another wrong question to ask is what can management do about this extravagance, when the right question is when will workers tire of being disenfranchised from the workplace, from the money changers, and from the marketplace? 

An ancillary right question would be: what prevents workers from growing up and accepting responsibility and accountability consistent with their interests?  It is futile to look for demons.

There are no demons here, no good guys and bad guys, only workers and managers moving away from good sense and the pragmatics of William James psychology, where self-interest once dictated enterprise for workers and managers alike.   

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To put this in some perspective, more than ninety percent of what workers said they needed in the beginning of the last century – a safe and healthy environment, pay for performance, fair benefits, adequate vacations and opportunity for promotion – has essentially materialized compared to what had existed before.

“Six Silent Killers” is not about powerless workers under siege as much as workers wanting to fall back on justification for their passive behaviors because of their frustration in the workplace.  Nor are the “Six Silent Killers” about anachronistic management, which clearly is outdated, but which paradoxically is supported and daily reconstituted as much by workers as by their managers.  Neither workers nor managers want to mount the struggle to institute a new system, which would appease if not eliminate the litany of their complaints about “the system,” as well as about each other.  They are the system.

Countless attempts have been made over time to encourage workers to be self-managers, including putting them on salary and giving them professional status.  I don’t know of a single case where hourly workers wanted to sacrifice the possibility of overtime pay for a salaried position, or for the possibility of coming in of a Saturday or Sunday to handle a rush order without double-time pay, or indeed, operating where there are few professional unions.

The final question, which the reader might ask is not why workers are suspended in terminal adolescence, but when will they decide to grow up?  A secondary question is when will workers decide to work without managers?

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

© January 8, 2013

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