James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 23,2013
REFERENCE:
Someone commented on my blog regarding my most recent essay (A Way of Looking at Things: “Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer”) with the question and comment, “Why do you write these essays? You can’t be making much money doing this.”
I often get comments on my blog and invariably they are anonymous. By the accident of this gargantuan task I committed myself to, of going through my clutter of literally thousands of pieces of published material over the past quarter century, and scores of unpublished works, including several book sized manuscripts, I occasionally come across something that surprises, no, astounds me, something that I have kept, but forgotten I had. In this case, it was an e-mail from a reader.
Novelist Don DeLillo claims writers write to save themselves as individuals. I can relate to that. More basically, however, I believe I write to ease the discomfort if not the pain of those living in these most tumultuous times.
We are culturally programmed to be so self-estranged that denial of our circumstances fails to cover it, alas, if we ran into ourselves in the mall chances are we would smile as if at a stranger.
On September 26. 2004, a reader wrote an e-mail to me after reading the Peripatetic Philosopher’s essay, “Who Put You In The Cage?” It is apparent that he has embraced his resistance to self-knowing, and is not afraid to admit it.
A READER WRITES:
When I encountered your essays originally, they “resonated” with me. I was feeling very much alone in my thoughts. It was very comforting to me that your thinking and analysis was consistent with what I was feeling, that the world was stark raving mad, not me.
You were ahead of your time, and maybe I was, too. It’s hard to know what others are experiencing or feeling, they are just too damned careful about revealing their thoughts, afraid in fact.
Today, I find more and more people willing to admit that they are fed up with the whole system and ready to do something about it. Most don’t know who to blame. Tragically, they don’t trust their own feelings or judgement. Reading your material is confirmation, I believe.
It is difficult for me to pick only a few essays (of the Peripatetic Philosopher). I like them all. These are some of the ones I have read:
Corporate Culture
Being Your Own Best Friend
Staying Employable in an Age of Downsizing
Leadership & Excellence in the 21 Century
Survivor’s Manual
Dealing with the Crazy 90s
Organizational Development
Advent of the Professional Worker
The Critical Need for a New Paradigm of Organization
The Lost Soul of the Engineer
Career Story: The Case of Hamilton Madison
The Cage
Who’s in Charge?
The American Worker and the Phantom Challenge
Parable of the Cage
Shifting Management Paradigms
Killing the Spirit
Victim, Inc.
Morale Management
Customer Expectations
A Letter to Ordinary
Words are Dead
A World Without the Power Elite
People are Different, but Predictably Different
Wake Up Call
Education?
Seductive Selling
Betrayal
Human Nature and Work
Conflict Management
OD is DA
War Room of the 1990s
America Asleep
The New Plague
Why Care
Difficult People
DR. FISHER COMMENTS:
As I’ve said elsewhere, we are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts. Writing is a way of making contact with an audience of one, ourselves, thus overcoming our bondage to loneliness, meeting that self as our new best friend. When the reader connects with what the writer has written, he or she connects with that audience of one. It was Cervantes that said, “There’s no book so bad that something good may not be found in it.” That is because the reader scripts the material to fit the reader’s own novel.
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