WHAT EVERYONE KNOWS ISN'T NECESSARILY SO

WHAT EVERYONE KNOWS ISN’T NECESSARILY SO



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

© May 31, 2013

REFERENCE:

This is an excerpt from “Meet Your New Best Friend” that will be released as a second edition in the fall.

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Parenthood is the most important job in the world and there are no qualifying examinations. Albeit not intended, more often than not, precious few parents seem to remember what it was like to be a child. Forgotten is how they became themselves. Each generation, for some reason, desires to save its progeny from the truth of its own life experience. Parents seek to protect their offspring from reality, from the pain, risk, embarrassment and missteps that first gave them identity, later to sustain them with character.

The process is a familiar one. The route to self–knowledge is not through parental wisdom. Even if this route were a viable one, few would take it. It is through life’s school of hard knocks that most find their way. Even formal education has little impact. It is a poor substitute for experience. Going from the womb of home to the womb of grammar and high school, and then unto the womb of the university or the job teaches little about life or living. No formal curriculum fulfills that purpose. Life must be lived, not contemplated to have meaning. For life to be lived, there must be encouragement at home and in school to experience it first hand.

Well intentioned parents, teachers, religious leaders and others are frequently mistaken when it comes to what is best for us, as the person in us is starting to express itself. Many have forgotten the trauma of youth, the boredom, the confusion, and hence the inherent lackadaisical quest for identity and authentication. As Immanuel Kant once wrote, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.” So, it is with our youth and, indeed, with our life.

Yet as we were programmed before, young people are programmed now. They are conditioned to hear, but remain silent, to be treated to half–truths, and trustingly to swallow them whole. There is seldom the sharing of doubt, or mention of the grip that fear and failure have on a normal life. What youth has always heard is the echo of Life’s triumphs, not Life’s failures.

It is Life’s failures, however, that have made Life’s triumphs possible. Therefore, young people sense something is wrong when they are struggling to crawl and are expected to soar without ever learning to walk through the foreboding brier patch of life.

Parental expectations, if these youngsters only knew, are often misbegotten dreams of their own failures. A tinsel of lies leaves little room for the young person to gain an insight into his own essence. Such an insight is essential to see the possibilities of future triumphs through the inevitable veil of frustration and failure.

Human frailty and folly are indigenous to human nature, not an incurable disease. To stumble or fall from grace does not shame one for life. There is never a magic time to start over. It could be 16 or 60. Everyone falls from grace, sometime, but not everyone can admit it, or pick themselves up by the bootstraps and get on with life. Acknowledgment of the fall is the first step toward recovery, even redemption. The parental temptation to construct an elaborate montage of overt triumphs superimposed on covert failures is a mistake. It smothers out the truth.

A human bond is created between parent and child when the parent’s real experience is shared discretely, timely and in its naked honesty. This bond gives the child permission to be a human being.

The whole business of deception and denial starts with confusion over goodness and evil. Goodness is not the absence of evil. Goodness is not even the triumph over evil, as anyone knows who has ever managed that feat. The capacity for good and evil are inherent within our character, inseparable, as they are part of the same whole. Interestingly enough, evil is “live” spelled backwards.

An affinity for evil actually moves us away from life’s possibilities, and therein resides the sin, whereas an affinity for good moves us toward life’s possibilities. The inherent problem is that we must embrace our natural resistance to life to discover our goodness. Goodness is never a done deal. Goodness requires work. Evil, on the other hand, requires only going with the flow. That is the distinction, the problem, the possibility and the opportunity, depending upon our perspective. Fear of evil is the obverse side of good. Good, then, moves us toward life’s realization for us, but always with the full understanding that evil is a constant and irascible companion on that journey.

It is easy to deny we are equally capable of good and evil. Some truly believe they are more full of goodness than others, or that they have little or no evil in them. They are wrong. Oh, how wrong they are! Good and evil are in balance when we come into the world. The balance is tilted one way or the other largely by our conditioning and life experience. But the capacity for either one is inherent in our nature.

Good is sensed as little more than a bore. Our fascination with evil is astonishing. Goodness is hardly of interest. It is as if goodness is not nearly as delicious or exciting as evil. Yet to blatantly celebrate evil is not condoned by society. So, we go to great lengths to experience evil subliminally through creative pursuits or vicariously through our fascination with the depraved behavior of others, especially celebrities. Books on satanic serial killers sell in the millions. Evil played off against good is high drama, the fodder of writers such as Stephen King. Celebrated figures turn true confessions of their hidden evil into bestsellers. As indicated in the last chapter, it should come as no surprise to learn authors of inspirational tomes on faith and goodness are often addictive personalities and closet companions of evil, being heavy drinkers, inveterate smokers and philanderers to boot.

Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, celebrated author of The Road Less Traveled (1978), confesses as much in his book, In Search of Stones (1995). He claims he writes so well of evil because he knows evil first hand, which (in turn) has put him in touch with his goodness. It is this combination, this awareness that makes him such a compelling author.

Contemporary religions have trouble with this reality. It is as if they are in a wrestling match with evil and only by pinning the devil to the mat will they win the support of the parishioners. They fail to recognize that by giving the devil such exposure, such prominence, it enhances the parishioner’s fascination with evil as well as exposing theirs. Instead of selling goodness, they play into the hands of the purveyors of evil. As long as the clergy and laity proclaim the diabolical nature of satanic entertainment, for instance, such music, film, art and books will flourish, and continue to sell in the mega-millions. Madison Avenue couldn’t dream up a more effective promoter.

The clergy’s negative campaigning realizes negative impact. Pronouncements of evil do not beget goodness in return. On the contrary, the clergy are actually selling the product, evil, that they purport to abhor. Our times are obsessed with evil and we need desperately to hear the “good news,” what the Gospels were meant to communicate. The clergy would have us believe that there is more evil now than at any other time in man’s history. Not true. There are more people. But there is no more evil in our times than any other, nor no less.

The clergy reduce good and evil to a choice, “either/or,” which incidentally was the title of the Danish religious thinker Soren Kierkegaard’s 1843 classic: either salvation through good works or damnation through evil deeds.

Few are buying this message. Anyone who takes a little time to reflect on the world around him knows that it is a rather precise mirror image of what goes on in the world within him. It could be disconcerting if he paid much attention to the incredible emphasis paid to evil, crisis, trauma and Armageddon; and the scant attention paid to good deeds and good days. His saving grace is that about 95 percent of all the information thrown at him misses its mark completely. He has become hardened to the ranting of those who cry, “crisis or damnation,” with every other breath. Sigmund Freud claims man needs religion as illusion to deal with the future, but not the religious. It is their home in the now.

The media, especially newspapers and television, support the clergy’s theme as they give wide attention to evil, little to goodness. Why not! Evil sells shampoo, hair spray, automobiles and psycho–thriller films, such as Quentin Tarantino’s amorality graffiti, Reservoir Dogs (1992), True Romance (1993), Natural Born Killers (1994) and Pulp Fiction (1994).

What makes evil more enchanting than goodness is theatrical violence. Tarantino epitomizes a kind of Post–modern primitive, neither especially immoral or amoral, but pre–moral, a kid whose Id loves the shoot–’em ups in the movies. This grown up child of the Pleasure Principle hasn’t thought through the echoes or consequences in the real world. Violence, it would seem, is not to be taken seriously, but found to be funny, entertaining. What appears to interest Tarantino is not violence, per se, but fiasco, the sense that life is a mess, even in fiction. His characters are wonderfully at home in the world of accident. For him, there is no interest in being realistic, because the world isn’t. With his peculiar brand of innocence, nothing is a matter of good or evil. It is like a dance sequence in a film, all style.

Immaturity has been taken to another level with current video games of this electronic age. We can see children as young as three or four playing these violent games with reckless abandon. Small wonder they become addicted to them well into their maturing years.

Goodness is envisioned as bland and lifeless, while the exact opposite is true. Actually, goodness is muscular, virile and strong. Evil is flabby, weak and lazy. Remember, goodness takes work, and evil goes with the flow. Artists, such as Tarantino, expose the hypocrisy of the whole idea of a moral universe, a culture which professes to be God-fearing, but acts self-sufficient; a culture which seeks an innocuous creed which consoles and reassures, which provides soul ease and aims to satisfy, a culture which displays little interest in being uplifting or challenging. Paint won’t make it any prettier.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF DISOBEDIENCE

 THE IMPORTANCE OF DISOBEDIENCE

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

© May 29, 2013

REFERENCE

One of the things you are bound to encounter, when you write against the grain of popular culture, is misunderstanding; the second is blow back.

I've experienced both from one reader of THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996).  She checked the book out at the library looking for a book to be more self-assertive, "and it was telling me everything that was wrong with me!"

No, it was encouraging the reader to be self-aware leading to self-acceptance and therefore to self-understanding.  I'm sorry it failed to do so.

TTABYOBF deals with a number of relevant concepts, including the importance of rebellion, that is, of disobedience.  Taking control of your life, which is the necessary precursor to "growing up,"  requires making sense of all the things you have been told are true against what your experience has taught you.  This is an emotional bridge to cross.  Perhaps that explains why so often this bridge is avoided.

Alas, the only way you can do this with rational sophistication is by assessing your experience and knowledge of living against what cultural society is continuously bombarding your conscience to the contrary.

Society, and its institutions always lag behind the needs and sensitivities of the time because they have such an investment in "things as they are."

It was the original reason why I wrote this missive, and why I post it again.

SOCIETY AT WAR WITH ITSELF

“Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, Sing, heav’nly Muse.”—John Milton (Paradise Lost)

“Wherever there is authority, 

There is a natural inclination to disobedience.” —Thomas Haliburton, Nova Scotia humorist

The solution to a society at war with itself is revealed in a much misunderstood concept, disobedience.

There is a time to obey and there is a time to disobey. Before we attain status as an individual, while we are in the process of being molded into a person, it is a time in our culture to obey. But to discover our own identity, to understand what we are about and why we exist for the future, it is necessary, even prudent, to disobey.

Most disobey to unshackle themselves from the conditioning process of The System at some point in their lives. The splendidly perfect child may not find the courage until middle age. Generally, however, the process happens quite naturally during late adolescence. Society has never found the measure of understanding this natural disturbance to deal with disobedience properly, choosing instead to give the conduct an assortment of negative connotations and to see it explicitly in shameful terms.

The System is not a sinister force designed to corrupt the individual. The System is society’s institutional acculturation process, the total impact of conditioning that shapes us into the person we become. This conditioning starts from the moment we are born, long before we have any conscious say in the matter. We are squeezed and pinched, pushed and prodded into what eventually and hopefully becomes a human being.

Experts note the remarkable importance of touching in our early physical and psychological development. Research shows babies held for long periods of time become healthy faster. Human touch also demonstrates long-range psychological benefits. Babies who enjoy constant human touch during their nursing or formula feeding period are more affectionate and gregarious, as they get older.

A husband or wife cold to the touch probably had little to do with the creation of this disposition. The same is true of the neighborhood's outlaws. Love in the form of touching is powerful medicine to the human spirit. It appears critical to development as a human being. There is no substitute for the warmth of human caring.

Touching is an uncommon practice with children of today’s generation. Society is characterized as insensitive. Touching and holding take time and patience. Time impacts the schedule of our hedonistic culture; time which most are unwilling to sacrifice.

Substituted for this lack of touching are things, material possessions. It is no accident that unloved children turn into consumer crazed adults for they equate possession of things with love. Therapy for them is a new toy, a relational gadget, which they can show off to the envy of others. But it never works.

Love is priceless and no amount of having can ever be substituted for genuine caring.

Touching, being in short supply, affects society vertically across socio-economic classes. Money cannot buy affection. The lack of affection leads to disaffection, which ferments into rebellion—the discontent and resentment of authority.

The role of parent, with which the rebellious youth identifies authority figures, is a failed role, an unloving role, perhaps even an abusive role. The pain of loss is expressed in the behavior of the nihilist or the anarchist. The seed once damaged is unlikely to ever bear fruit. It is more likely to putrefy the environment with the stench of social pathology. We are seeing this manifested in runaway crime in our streets and run amuck behavior in our classrooms.

Yet there is always hope. Redemption is discovered when we recognize the way we are, and have the will to choose to be different. It involves a progression:

There is a process of craving affection (which is normal as a child) to discovering the capacity to love as a fully grown up person without the craving. This is the natural road from immaturity to maturity. A key to know where we stand is expressed in terms of love:

Do I love you because I need you (immature love)?

Do I need you because I love you (mature love)?

The answer tells us who is in control. What follows is a journey into our society and us as individuals. It is a bumpy ride so fasten your seat belt.

THE ROLLER COASTER TO SELF-KNOWING

When people start to entertain their own thoughts, begin to sense the quality of their own hearts, experience the conflict between what they are told and what they uncover for themselves, we have the making of disobedience.

This disobedience is both healthy and necessary. It is the only path to maturity. Disobedience is the route to personal identity as an individual. It establishes a human being as a person and not as a clone of others.

Without disobedience, individuals never become persons wholly on their own terms and in their own right. They attempt instead to live up to the expectations of others. Not only is this impossible, it can prevent a person from becoming all that person could become. The German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe put it best:

“If you treat an individual as he is, he will stay as he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.”

This takes giving yourself the benefit of the doubt. It means seeing yourself as the person you would like to become, and then being a friend to that person in a supportive and encouraging manner. The kindness you show yourself when it counts, the tolerance you display when you fall short of the mark, and the love you demonstrate when there is no love about you will ensure you become that person.

Disobedience usually manifests itself at puberty. With the constant assault of the senses via television, radio, newsprint and now cell phones, the Internet and all the ubiquitous social and emotional connections, it can happen earlier. If anything, this acceleration has thrown the individual and society off course and into a nihilistic zone of constant confusion where priorities are continuously muddled.

Still, at this stage, it can be controlled and guided through the obstinacy of the headstrong "know it all" mindset of the youth to an agreeable conclusion, not necessarily through secondary processes such as family support, counseling and education, but more likely through the primary role of the individual finding this new balance within himself to be his own best friend.

Without self-acceptance during this traumatic period of chaos, doubt, confusion and rejection, the individual is unlikely to negotiate the No Man’s Land of disobedience and arrive safely on the other side to maturity.

Instead, the individual is apt to spend most of his days in suspended adolescence, a puppet on a string to titular authority. Before a person can show genuine kindness to another person, he must first be able to show kindness to himself.

The disobedient person, with the courage to accept the responsibility of the condition, recognizes the primacy of The System. He first attempts to find himself within society and to bend the rules to accommodate his developing awareness and personal belief and value system. Outright rebellion is the Court of Last Resort. Unable to find meaning and measure for himself in The System, he goes to the extreme.

Rebellion views traditional values and beliefs as either unfounded or irrelevant. This is sophistic, but such an individual is too committed to “throwing the baby out with the bath water” to sense anything but his own existence.

Life is senseless as experienced and therefore everything beyond the self “sucks.” Keep this differentiation in mind. Disobedience–rebellion remains pivotal as we continue in development, and both disobedience and rebellion have their function in the person who will ultimately reach maturity.

The first signs of change are traumatic for parents as well as for the child, but inevitable.

A CASE IN POINT

Mary was a single parent of a thirteen-year-old daughter. Mary worked in an electronics firm as an assembler. She was proud of her daughter who was tall for her age, beautiful and a high achiever. One day Mary broke into uncontrollable sobs at her workstation. When her supervisor tried to console her, she displayed erratic behavior. She became abusive of the supervisor and went into an incoherent tirade, ending with “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

Totally perplexed, the supervisor sent her to the company psychologist. “She is one of my best workers,” the supervisor said, “what has gotten into her, I don’t know, but she is not herself. Help her if you can. She is a good people.”

The first thing Mary asked when she met with the psychologist was, “Can I smoke?” The psychologist smiled. Mary knew it was against company policy. “If you must, yes,” he said.

“Now, may I ask you a question?” An icebreaker is often the most critical stage.

Mary looked away, grabbed a pack of cigarettes from her purse, stamped the cigarette hard on the desk, then like a hairy armed bouncer, lit it, took a deep drag, then looked defiantly at the psychologist, as she blew smoke over his head. “It depends,” she said.

“Fair enough,” he replied. He pretended to be looking through her file, which he had read already.

“Do you like working here?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like your work?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like your supervisor?”

“I thought you were going to ask one question. That is three,” she said studying him.

He put his right hand over his heart, “I plead guilty as charged.” She broke into a guarded smile.

“Yes, I like my boss. She’s a gem.”

“So, I think we can assume this is not work related. This is personal.”

He waited for her reply. Her look expressed volumes. There was hurt in her eyes. Real pain. Still, she said nothing. He waited. It was obvious she was torn between defensiveness and disclosure. Could she trust him?

“It’s Champagne, my daughter,” she said finally. She then went on to describe her daughter in the most glowing terms, a conscientious honor student, churchgoer, always punctual, never lies or talks back, always polite, always tells where she is going, popular but ‘not yet boy crazy like her girlfriends,’ tidy, industrious and so on. She sang her daughter’s praise for twenty minutes. Her face was aglow as she expressed her maternal pride. She stopped suddenly, breaking into tears. The psychologist gave her a tissue. She thanked him, wiped her eyes, the tissue black with mascara.

“I don’t know what to do. I am at my wit’s end.” She then sobbed, clenching and reclenching her fists, as her supervisor had described.

As she continued to sob, the psychologist remained composed, quietly waiting, making no attempt to move on. The catharsis seemed to exhaust her, but also to relax her. She was ready to tell the rest of her story.

Champagne was not coming home after school. She was lying about where she had been; not going to church; staying out past curfew (Her mother had an 11:00 p.m. curfew); being seen with boys. Her room was a mess. She failed to make the honor roll in the first two grading periods of the year, a first! She skipped school and hid a letter of suspension from the principal that was mailed to her mother. Cigarettes were found in her purse. She denied they belonged to her, denied ever smoking. Now she was even talking back to her mother.

“So what do I do, doctor?” she said defiantly. “I understand you have all the answers.”

“What seems to be the problem?” the psychologist said without sarcasm. “What I have. . .” He didn’t get any further.

“What seems to be the problem?” she screamed. “What the freaking hell seems to be the problem?” she repeated hysterically. “You’ve got to be joking?” Her face an expression of disbelief, coated with anger.

“No,” he repeated.

“Buster! You know what? You beat all!” She grabbed her purse, spun around in her chair and nearly leaped to the door. All the time she was shaking her head, expletives leaking out of her hair.

“Wait!” he said. “Please! Wait!” he continued in a quiet voice. “I’ve listened to you. Right? You owe it to me to hear me out.” She hesitated, turned back. “Please!” he said again. She slumped into the chair, looked at her watch. “You’ve got two minutes!”

He smiled. “I’ll hurry,” he said, letting her know she was in charge. That was a good sign. “What I hear,” he began, “is your fear. I also sense your love for your daughter. She is your life. You want for her all the things that you have been denied. You also want to save her from the hurt and pain you’ve experienced.” Mary rummaged through her purse for another cigarette. She was not going anywhere. Her eyes were downcast, fixed on her lap as if doing penance. She smoked furtively, picking off the tobacco from her lips. She was enveloped in a cloud of smoke.

“It is hard for us to realize it sometimes,” he continued, “but what made you the person I see is that experience. Your daughter is taking those first precarious steps we all must take to become a person. Up to now she has been a windup doll, a robot, a machine . . . .”

He studied her. There was doubt expressed in her sad eyes, but she was listening. “She was your machine,” he added, “and you provided all the meaning to that machine. None of this was hers.”

“Now she is struggling to become a person in her own right, no longer your or anyone else’s machine. She is struggling to find out who that person is. Identity is a horrendous problem to her. She will experiment. She will test. She will flirt with danger. She lives in her head. She dreams. She fantasizes. She romanticizes her experiences. She embraces danger everyday but sees herself immortal.”

Mary bolted upright with these words. The psychologist decided to go forward more gently.

“She will change her dress. Use cosmetics. Change her hair. Her nails. Her language. Yes, perhaps even her name and certainly her behavior. Be a tease. Fantasize she is a party girl. Life is her laboratory. She may even get a tattoo for she is flirting with the idea of a more glamorous persona. This is common.

“She will also start to question things, like the value of school, going to church, of working for a living, her relationships. All this is normal, healthy. Also necessary. You smoke. She will try it. If you drink, she will try that, too.

“On the other hand, if you neither smoke nor drink, no guarantee she won’t experiment with them. None. There are no guarantees at all at this stage, just as there were none when you were young. Youth is precarious, exciting, enchanting, and dangerous. But the dangers are so great today and so final in consequence, that the need for vigilance is real. Your concern is important to her. No doubt. She wants you to worry. She wants you to care. She wants to know there is someone who loves her when she finds it difficult to love herself.

“What your daughter needs now is not a mother, but a friend, a confidante. A mother’s love got her to this point. She must find a way to cross the barrier to love, respect and trust herself, to be equal to the challenges ahead without you looking over her shoulder.

“She needs you now as her best friend. She needs that person in whom she can confide and not be judged, who will tell her the things happening to her are part of life, not to be feared. She needs to know her best friend has been there before and understands.

“Tell her she is okay, so she can tell herself that, too. A friend doesn’t have to be perfect. Indeed, perfection is not what a person expects from a friend, but understanding and support when she feels less than perfect.

“A friend makes no attempt to make her daughter into a Mother Teressa or the Blessed Virgin Mother. A best friend helps to understand the dancing hormones in her child’s body, to accept the anguish in her young heart, to appreciate her possibilities without surrendering her will. A best friend helps her deal with her fears and not be afraid to love. Love and fear are constant throbs in her young heart. Confusing. Tempting. Exciting. Scary.

“Give her a little slack. Not too much. Just a little. When she screws up, let her know you know. Knowing she is not getting away with anything is an important kind of punishment.

“Tell her always, no matter what, that you love her. She needs to hear this in order to love herself. Express your disappointment, too, but show her that being disappointed is not the end of the world. Help her to learn to love herself despite her imperfections. Make it clear you are always there for her. This will help her learn to be there for herself. Linus in the Peanuts cartoon is not the only one who needs a blanket to feel safe. We all do.

“You are still her teacher, but the education is now daughter centered, no longer mother centered. Disappointed as you may be, she needs to be more disappointed.

"There is no leverage in saying, ‘How could you do this to me after all I’ve done for you?’ That is mother centered. Say instead, ‘Champagne, how could you do this to yourself?’ Disappointment is the most fitting punishment.

“Control of behavior must move from your eyes to hers, from your center to her center. Once established, flirting with danger will have less and less appeal. You are showing her by being her best friend how she can learn to be her own best friend. It is what you really want, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she replied weakly. “I want so to be the perfect mother,” wiping her eyes. “I’m not, you know,” wondering if the psychologist could see through her.

* * *

BE YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND -- AN EXCHANGE

BE YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND – AN EXCHANGE


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

© May 28, 2013

A READER WRITES (re: What has all this to do with being “your own best friend”?)

Jim,

Some interesting thoughts here and well expressed. Just a couple of points.

You say, “The case for being your own best friend is a moral one. Morality cannot be imposed upon us, but we can, indeed, we must impose morality on ourselves to act rationally and freely in our own best interests. This will be, by extension, in the best interests of everyone we touch without exception.

and, “The ideas expressed here are meant to demonstrate that we are ends in ourselves, and not means to some arbitrary ends of someone else. This is so because we are the ultimate authors of the rules that guide us and to which we freely submit. To suggest that this is narcissistic or egoistic is to miss the point.” How do you feel about the philosophy of Ayn Rand?

You quote Kant:

Then you say, “Our corporate society has relegated its citizens to dependent children, which is the greatest of despotisms and destroyers of freedom. Writing 270 years ago (1743), Immanuel Kant had this to say":

“The man who is dependent on another is no longer a man, he has lost his standing, he is nothing but the possession of another man.”

That seems like a rather excessive assertion. Who among us in independent? Certainly not the most powerful. In fact I would rank them among the most dependent. Certainly not the weakest for whom mere survival requires dependence. This isn’t something that results merely from the corporate society. The first time two guys went out to hunt together and the beast they selected for dinner injured one who was then cared for and fed by the other one who managed to kill the beast, dependency occurred and was accepted and it worked for the good of the group and individuals in it.

Modern society, corporate or otherwise with it’s increased specialization increases the manner and ways of dependence, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sure, in a sense the farmer owns you because you would starve without him, but then you also hold him dependent because he would not be able to pay for his seed if you didn’t buy his product. It has been only through this interdependence that we have been able to raise the condition of man ever higher and it is in those parts of the world that have most vigorously embraced it that the greatest achievements have been made. Neither Salk nor Sabin were independent actors. They were highly dependent on prior knowledge advanced by others and thankfully they found it in their own rational best interests to freely accept the dependence they had to, to achieve their ends. I think they and Gandhi and even Kant were more than “but the possession of another man.”

Take care,

Ted

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Ted.

This is thought provoking, with which my book, in fact, all my books are meant to generate. I am familiar with Rand's objectivist philosophy but I am not an advocate of her views, which are very materialistic, while mine are moralistic, or you might even say somewhat spiritualistic.

I should say I am advocating the antithesis of her views, as she is, if anything, an atheist, which I am not, and a capitalist to the nth degree, which I am not as well. I’m associating myself in this missive to you as something as my moral imperative. Being your own best friend has been centerpiece to my philosophy and life

The key word in your response is interdependence.

You cannot be interdependent unless or not before you are reasonably well self-directed, self-determined, self-motivated and independent making choices from inner directedness sponsored by self-governance or autonomy.

You cannot go from dependence to interdependence. It is a bridge too far, and no one ever finds away to cross it. Dependence breeds on and of itself with comfort, complacency, and want, constant want, which is translated into need.

If as human beings, we do not look first to ourselves, but always to others for help before we determine our own strengths and weaknesses we will (and have) progressed to the society we have today. If we program our children to be suspended in terminal adolescence, we create a generation very much like the baby boomer generation and “me” generation down to the present.

If we do not teach our children to be inner directed and to make choices in their own best interest, we will have the generations that we see we have now, which has been spawned over the past seventy-five years.

If when someone eggs us on to have a cigarette or drink alcohol when we are ten or twelve or older, if someone teases us for being a goody good when we won’t experiment with drugs, or become active sexually when we have no idea what it entails, when someone makes fun of us for taking books home and studying our lessons and doing our own work, we may not be too popular with the “in” crowd but we will be our own best friend, and decades later, we will look back on such a wonderful existence we will want to share its reality with others.

We have bred dependence into our system. Dependence is what our child rearing, educational system, and our working establishment has bred into us. The book has a broad framework and looks at this situation somewhat analytically and you might even say microscopically. I have enough confidence in my craft that I think with pruning I have made my case more comprehensible if not necessarily reinforcing for those enslaved to current manners and mores.

That said you cannot go from powerlessness to interdependence. The point I am trying to make with this book is that before you can love and respect another you must first love and respect yourself; before you can aid and comfort another you must find the means and opportunity and have the motivation to aid and comfort yourself. It doesn’t work the other way around in my experience. I have always thought being able to say “no” is one of the most beneficial words in the English language.

From my vantage point, the examples you have given, except for the hunting one, apply to a minority of souls and not the majority. Most people I have run into in my long life do not seem to recognize that they are endowed with reason that allows them to solve their own problems; that attaining material wealth with all its accoutrements – the cars, the boats, the fine homes, the fine clothes, the fine lifestyles – may generate envy or rise out of one’s own envious spirit, but things will not bring peace and inner contentment because it requires none of these, only the freedom to make choices as one’s own best friend. We are dominated by an acquisitive society, what Christopher Lasch called a narcissistic society just prior to the Information Age, only to die before he saw how prophetic he was.

Modern society, in my view, has created a cancer and that cancer is corpocracy. What Rand thought was so important is a pejorative to me.

We speak of individualism and claim the United States of America sponsors individual initiative, but I think that is quite misleading. In our society, the true self is not the individual but the corporation. We identify with the corporation, the individual is but an element in the corporation, and if he should cut himself off from it, he becomes a limb without a body, a meaningless fragment that derives its only significance from its association with that system, with that whole.

It has been with us a long time in our culture, our churches, our schools, our races, and our classes, but corpocracy has perfected it to generate only a collective self and form of life to be lived by conforming individuals while acting free when actually be unfree, when meaning and purpose is the group norm and not the individual’s prerogative, when the values that the individual embodies are institutional values with its infallible authority, an authority for which there can be no appeal, and a subservience so pervasive that it is not even noticed.

Within this climate, and it is the climate in which I see us, it is difficult for a man to hear the voice within him, for if he does hear it, it is tainted with outside morality as he is blinded and deafen to what matters most to him because he no longer has the will or the way to find it. Specialization has not only driven this man into a machine of changeable parts, but also into what Kierkegaard called a non-person.

Specialization, which most people think is a good thing, and inevitable, has fed this monster corpocracy and continues to feed it until one day I am certain it will die. Society has bought the corporate model and society is dying by crime, malfeasance, violence, genocide and suicide at a level we never anticipated. We have become insensitive to our own societal sickness.

Take B. F. Skinner, the psychologist with his operant conditioning. We have seen this programming repeated in education. Psychologists who have followed Skinner’s model want to stamp out ignorance and prejudice, superstition and cruelty, misery and injustice by treating us as unthinking animals. This programming has been tantamount to brainwashing with the lofty purpose of producing a peaceful and well-adjusted and contented flock of human beings, but obviously on automatic pilot. Thank God it has failed!

Kant wrote of the freedom and dignity of the human personality insisting that required a person to be independent and free of such mechanisms not only of men but of nature, too.

Modern compulsory education, as Alvin Toffler ("Future Shock") wrote about so wisely, was a late 19th and early 20th century program to train workers who could read a little write a little and do simple math. It was not to enhance them as humanistic human beings. Corpocracy from the beginning has been exploitative by using men as means, not as ends in themselves, and so it is to our day.

This is a particular form of inequality whereby you make men, by persuasion or coercion or something in between, do the corporate will not necessarily the will of individuals. It was bad in the beginning but impossible now, as the goals by which we conduct our working lives, whatever the discipline, are known to corpocracy but not to us. Put bluntly, we are not in charge.

We have invented a whole terminology to describe this: anomie, alienation, exploitation, degradation, humiliation, dehumanization, it goes on and on. .

We will always have people who need help but our aim should not be to cage them in helplessness but show them away out of it, if possible.

Ted, it is so hard to get people’s attention. It was hard 170 years ago. It is even harder today. Reading Kant and Kierkegaard, I can not help but think, I would have been more at home in their times than my own because thinkers and writers think and write cosmetically and they did not, nor do I.

Be always well,

Jim


*     *     *

WHAT HAS ALL THIS TO DO WITH BEING "YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND"?

WHAT HAS ALL THIS TO DO WITH BEING "YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND"?



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

© May 28, 2013



REFERENCE:



This is an excerpt from “Meet Your New Best Friend,” which is to be published in a second edition. This is inserted in the center of the text as the book represents a broad framework of what I see as a crippling problem of our time.



Paternalism, benign or otherwise, has run its course. So have emotionalism, disordered enthusiasm and sentimental rhetoric. Grand schemes devoid of personal experience and uncritical acceptance have too often been substituted for reason and have led to our being un-grown-up in our approach to life.

The dry light of reason supported by science has changed the boundaries of consciousness where sensible man can verify for himself without parental or institutional authority what as well as who is best for him, starting with being friends, first and foremost to and with himself.

Inequality, hierarchies, paternalism and nationalism have lost or are losing their clout as liberal rationalism is coming into its own, starting with the individual. Immanuel Kant has written:



“Beings who have received the gifts of freedom are not content with the enjoyment of comfort granted by others.”



We have seen and are seeing what comfort does. It not only leads to complacency but also demoralizes and wreaks havoc on motivation. The most important distinguishing characteristic of human beings is the freedom to act, to choose between what is self-enhancing or self-adverting. Unless a person can be said to be the true author of his own acts, he cannot be described as responsible for them. Where there is no responsibility, there can be no morality.

Inanimate life does not make choices. It behaves as it does by the causal forces of nature, which are outside its control. This is not so with us, that is, unless we are unable to control our minds and bodies to do what is best for us.

We have, as free men, the right to act rightly or wrongly, virtuously or viciously according to our lights. We have the free will to control external factors – physical, chemical, biological, physiological, geographical and ecological – by our internal psychological guidance system. If we choose to be at the mercy of causal forces, rationalizing that we can do nothing but “go with the flow,” then we might as well be a turnip.

Although causal laws may affect our bodies, they need not affect our inner self. The external world is dealt with by science. The internal world, which should be free to make choices, is a function of voluntary actions and the foundation of morality. If there is no such freedom, there can be no possibility of moral law.

The case for being your own best friend is a moral one. Morality cannot be imposed upon us, but we can, indeed, we must impose morality on ourselves to act rationally and freely in our own best interests. This will be, by extension, in the best interests of everyone we touch without exception.

We have reached the point with the rush of history and the calamity and complexity that it has enjoined to demonstrate autonomy (self-governance), meaning giving rules to ourselves, and the freedom from being coerced or from being determined by something or someone we cannot control.

The ideas expressed here are meant to demonstrate that we are ends in ourselves, and not means to some arbitrary ends of someone else. This is so because we are the ultimate authors of the rules that guide us and to which we freely submit. To suggest that this is narcissistic or egoistic is to miss the point.

Should we be made to submit to something that does not proceed from our own rational nature, and is inconsistent with it, is to degrade us as persons, and to treat us as children instead of as a grown up, as mere animals or as objects to manipulate as things to be managed.

To deprive ourselves of the power of choice is to do to ourselves the greatest imaginable injury. No matter how benevolent the intention with which it is done this does irreparable damage to our individual spirit.

Paternalism is the antithesis of being your own best friend. That said this effort here is not to make you more assertive against institutional paternalistic authority, but to offer you a framework for viewing your own reality differently by stepping outside external dependency to make friends with yourself armed with internal integrity and ethical authority consistent with your nature. What you do beyond that is up to you.

To be civilized is to be grown up, that is to say, to behave responsibly to others and not allow anyone to treat you as a child, or to barter your freedom away with entitlements for the sake of security and comfort, or flattery to do what is against your nature to do, or any other device that might compromise your internal integrity and self-regard.

Our corporate society has relegated its citizens to dependent children, which is the greatest of despotisms and destroyers of freedom. Writing 170 years ago (1843), Immanuel Kant had this to say:



“The man who is dependent on another is no longer a man, he has lost his standing, he is nothing but the possession of another man.”



To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve, and diminish them as persons. The same holds true of ourselves. We have seen what has happened to our world as a result of this faulty doctrine in the 20th century. The fact that it lapses into the 21st century indicates how little self-regard is yet to be appreciated.

Modernity is the culture of separation (what John Doone suggests, “ ‘Tis all in peeces. .”) and science leads the way with materialism obliterating spiritualism, and secularism finding little time, attention or room for the soul. With all the brilliance of science there seems little wisdom. Our fragmented, frantic world strives to make up imagined deficits, not by holistic thinking, but through a patchwork of inventions. Society, as expressed through technology, is too clever by half. Typical is the experience of a scientist who attempted to make synthetic rubber. Overnight the beaker solidified. He couldn’t extract the material by conventional means, so he burned it off. The heat generated was so intense that he measured it. Thus solid propellant fuel was created, a happy accident, making the jet age possible.

We are also happy accidents. We come into the world surrounded by strangers, in a strange place and time in history. The distinguished American entomologist Edward O. Wilson captures this sentiment in the first sentence of his fine biography, Naturalist (1994): “I have been. . .a happy man in a terrible century.” The strangers we first encounter—our parents and immediate family—have much to do with how we are formed. We see, hear, watch and behave like them. We imitate what we see, hear and observe. These strangers reinforce or correct our interpretation of experience, by applause or scolding. Our initial role in life is that of entertainer. From this we develop a high need to please others; to put a smile on their faces; to control them by giving pleasure; by manipulating them through exploitation of their weaknesses; and thus coming to exploit ourselves.

By the time we enter school we are professional pleasers. Now we are exposed to another set of strangers, teachers, who tell us what is true and important. We are compliant and pliable. What we see, hear and observe at school may not complement what we experience at home, seeding a budding conflict. When we attend church, Sunday school or the Temple, we learn of God and about….



* * *

SHYLOCK EXPOSED! A Reader writes of the reality of work today.

SHYLOCK EXPOSED! A reader writes of the reality of work today.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 18, 2013

A READER WRITES:

Yesterday was my 25th anniversary at my job. It was a proud day and a sad day. Not one word of recognition for those 25 years. Guess this is what happens when a corporation takes over and you become a number. Two days before they had a recognition ceremony for long term employees but I was not included because my anniversary was after the cut-off date. Just the way the ball bounces as I was told. I became a new employee on March 1st when the corporation took ownership so all those years of dedication and loyalty are a thing of the past. My anniversary date of May 17th was the icing on the cake and I am so happy with my decision to retire sometime this year.


DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY! Knowing you and knowing your dedicated service to this institution and knowing your caring ways throughout the years, I am pleased, no I am proud that you have self-congratulated yourself for your devoted service.

Obviously, there will be no gold watch, no compensation package, no recognition banquet, no collection of friends and relatives and fellow employees to toast your celebration. You are alone in your recognition, your achievement and your appreciation of a job well done.

You have also with this note brought to light the stark reality of the institution made naked. Not only does the purchase of one corporation by another bring a wrecking ball to the enterprise, it disrupts and decimates the culture, the values and beliefs, the implicit rules and relationships, the modus operandi of daily activity. The institution is like Shakespeare's "Shylock" taking a pound of flesh, which is the heart, and leaving the body behind.

The wrecking ball has no conscience, no heart, no feeling for people as persons. It is a matter of dollars and cents, of profit before people, which has no sense. It is the infallibility of authority that believes power is purpose and is justified by the rationale of progress. Those in the corporation take it for granted that they have the power to drive that purpose.

It is not a new thing, not by a long shot. It is why I write books, why I have written such books as "Work Without Managers" and "The Worker, Alone" and "Corporate Sin" and "Time Out for Sanity" and yes, "Meet Your New Best Friend,"

You display that last book with consummate skill and bravado. I salute you for it. You are, indeed, your own best friend.

The corporate, so conceived, has been treading in very disturbing waters for a long time. It shows it has now touched the shore with your treatment where everyone can see it for what it is, a pecuniary and mercenary institution, and not human at all. Yet, without people, without people such as you, the corporation dies. It is a human institution that has become inhuman, and shall pay for its sins in the long run.

If you read my recent essay that I posted to my readers on what “Time Out for Sanity is About" (see www.peripateticphilosopher.com May 16, 2013), you should not be surprised about how you have been treated.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney said a corporation is human because it is peopled with workers, but he was wrong, dead wrong. A corporation is Machiavellian to the nth degree, and you are now experiencing its insensitivity.

Corporation respect only power and money, people with clout or people who could hurt it, and therefore the corporation acts accordingly.

You are a little person, I am a little person who writes books, and we are little people who the corporation feels it can ignore or dispense with or dispatch at will without doing itself any harm.

The corporation would be wrong because you have had the temerity to write this note, and distribute it to your friends, not with rancor but with disappointment and sadness.

People in America should read your note whatever their status whatever their career level whatever their denial of the poignancy of what you say, as people in America like to believe the corporation "is a family," and that as family the corporation has people’s best interests at heart.

That is not true. People are a commodity, goods in the company store, that have a shelf life and a value and a disposable rate as if they were inanimate, but people are animate. Unfortunately, people are also docile and obliging and take their disregard and disrespect quietly into the night without a word as long as they earn enough to keep body and soul together.

You are different and I salute you for it. God love and keep you always because you, whom I know well, represent the best of us all.

*     *     *



Jim

ABOUT "TIME OUT FOR SANITY! -- Blueprint for Dealing with an Anxious Age"

“Time Out for Sanity! – Blueprint for Dealing with an Anxious Age.”


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

© May 16, 2013

REFERENCE:

This was prepared for the second edition of this book, originally titled, “A Look Back to See Ahead: Our Chronic Culture Viewed from the 1970s.”

About “Time Out for Sanity!”

I thought long and hard about writing this book. The problem was resolved when I convinced myself it could give the reader a new perspective on how we have come to be stuck in our false confidence with a possible way out.

While science is looking for a universal theory, social and economic thinkers seem to be looking for a ecumenical system that answers all the questions, public and private, scientific and historical, moral and aesthetic, individual and institutional. The result is that there is seemingly a constant clash between progressive and reactionary agendas. The obstructionists ignore the complexity of the problems being faced while progressives deny the existence of these problems and turn their attention to irrelevancies.

We see this in our institutions and commerce: in the family which has become an irrelevancy; in the school which despite pouring more and more money into education continues to produce an inferior product; in business with its infallible authority and business as usual practices despite nearly throwing the world as well as the country into another great depression; in the religious in which the focus has been more on preserving its viability than discharging its mission; and in government that stays the same, misses the changes, is unable or unwilling to face them, leaving the future up for grabs.

These institutions originally created to respond to real societal needs are no longer capable of fulfilling them. They have been so transformed into mere impediments to human progress, in so doing, breeding their own tensions and diseases while generating their own false remedies.

Strife, conflict and competition between and among these human institutions have become essentially pathological. What makes them abnormal is that they do not fulfill those ends that citizens-as-citizens cannot avoid having in common, which are common purposes that develop in society as a human entity with spiritual and material potentialities.

All forms of behaviour are not rational, that is, on a personal basis, for they lead to various degrees of self-distortion and frustration. To know what we must do, we must know what and where we are in the pattern of the processes that envelop us, which in turn determine the shape of our society. Yet, despite this view, it is possible for us to analyse the situation correctly but fail to behave accordingly.

Nothing is value free much as science would imply it is possible to realize objectivity with detached contemplation. The division between facts and values is a shallow fallacy for every thought involves an evaluation, no less than every act and every feeling. Values are already personified in our general attitude to the world, in our outlook that shapes our perceptions and the way we think, see, believe, understand, discover and know a thing to be true or not.

Another way of saying this is that the ‘self’ is not a static entity. The notion that we are dispassionate observers free from the stream of values that bombard our senses from our culture is profoundly fallacious. Worse it may be a disguised retreat or escape from the reality of experience posing as a rational dispassionate detachment, what existential philosopher Sartre calls simply “bad faith.”

In revisiting this original essay written in the early 1970s, it was like déjà vu, as everything seemed to change when nothing actually seemed much different. There were so many parallels with our present time that I thought it would be useful to take a “Time Out for Sanity!” Alas, the more things change the more they remain the same.

Armed with cell phones, laptops, Blackberrys, videophones, PlayStations, Game Boys, MP3’s, iPods, iPads, mobiles, and continually more sophisticated digital tools that have become increasingly escape toys, we have sidetracked our evasive minds from an obsession with sex of the late twentieth century (1970s) to an equally compelling obsession with cyberspace in the early twenty-first. Now, pixels have replaced people while synthetic gimmicks such as Viagra have been invented to keep our flagging libidos alive.

Unfortunately, not even the finest handheld electronics with their memory boards of microscopic dimensions can save us from the shock of being stuck in circumstances that look uncannily like that of the 1970s. Facts and values are fused together. Whatever our current proclivities, we are made what we are by the interplay of historical, social and material factors, and these values are determined by our tasks and preoccupations whether creative and enhancing or destructive and debilitating.

Look around you, as I did four decades ago, and tell me you don’t see people with glazed eyes running harder than ever before and getting nowhere. I suspect you have encountered the same clueless faces that appear as if they don't like what they are doing or where they are going, but have little idea what they would prefer to be doing or going.

To live is to act. To act is to pursue some goal, choose, accept, reject, pursue, resist, retreat, escape, or be for or against something or some aspect of something. The self-conscious know this; the unself-conscious merely act without thinking.

Values are therefore part of the very texture of living that includes thinking, feeling, or willing. Hence, we choose to act as if we were goods in a shop. The fact is we are where and what we are, taking in our notions and fancies, which may lead us to a static garden or perceptive objective. The rational and irrational are always in interplay in our temperament.

We are on the precipice of understanding that we have no characteristics, which are not shared with all other men. We are moving from man as the soul of the true believer, who took comfort in sacred books, pronouncements of the church, metaphysical insights, scientific enlightenment, or the general will of an uncorrupted society to understanding the world in its own terms. We are ready to deal with its machinery and the unalterable direction of its growth. We are on the precipice of growing up.

Four decades ago, a large rebellious contingent escaped into psychedelic wonderland. The escape today is of a contingent of more docile temperaments into some kind of electronics. It never occurs that these electronic wonders may eventually fry their brains until they have no memory of the damage, operating as if on a schizophrenic high that in some ways seems reminiscent of those chemically induced psychedelic highs of the 1970s.

This book is written in the hopes that it causes the reader to reflect on the choices being made, producing consequences more consistent with blessings than not. To that end, I wish all readers well.



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

Tampa, Florida

CONFIDENCE, COPING AND CULPABILITY

 CONFIDENCE, COPING AND CULPABILITY


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

© May 12, 2013

Confidence, the question of confidence, who has it and who does not, weighs on the mind of the times. These are not only difficult times but confidence forms threads to a wider pattern of an intricate complex of subtly interconnected ideas rather than belonging to a singular framework.

Our sense of reality has taken a jolt. The richness and diversity of human experience with its endless variety and individuality of things and people has come to cross currents, often spiraling into despair in terms of social intercourse and personal relationships.

Self-regard and confusions of aims lies beneath the surface of public life often in chaotic detail concealing actual motivation and projected experience.

We long after some unitary truth that will altogether transcend our problems and the distractions that plague mundane existence. In the course of a century, we have departed from our spiritual anchors of family and church to scientism and commercial secularism blurring our boundaries and introducing us to an alien world with its new litany of what is important, significant and admirable. In the process, we have left ourselves behind and with it our confidence and control.

Laws divide us between science and Utopia, effectiveness and ineffectiveness in every sphere of our lives as we are now relegated to reason and observation in a scientific age. We are also governed in a discoverable direction, where our course has been plotted more or less precisely, as if we were a clock and our movements were synchronized with a future that had no past and could never find a home in the present. That is the legacy of the twentieth century.

We fail to shrink from killing millions of human beings against accepted beliefs as to what is feasible and right, against what is thought right, by the majority. To survive, our institutions in one sense have had to be more malleable and our laws more elastic then at any other point in our history. Yet, we have yet to decide whether our creative or destructive capacities are to prevail.

Human beings can be radically altered, re-educated, conditioned and turned topsy-turvy, and yet while this is all happening (as it is now), to act as if nothing has changed and everything is habitual and normal as it has always been. Our unconsciousness to the human condition led Aldous Huxley to write “Brave New World” and George Orwell to pen “1984,” alas, with little notable impact.

We have become skillful forgeries as if pieces of synthetic antiquarianism grafted onto our inescapably contemporary foundation. Our fixed habits, our framework of things, our persons, attitudes and ideas, our uncritical assumptions, and our unanalyzed beliefs, leave us in the void, supported only by our language.

We think in words, as I am doing here, but fail to realize that our language, with its symbolism is suffused with our basic attitudes and mistaken beliefs, and therefore represents a retreat from reality, a comfort zone that is tissue thin.

It is only when our nerves touch other nerves which lie deep within us that we feel what we are feeling, think what we are thinking, and are conscious of the electric shock of life and what is genuine and profound. Otherwise, we go through life robotically with nothing touching our innermost private and quintessential thoughts and feelings. When that happens, we become furniture of our external world.

“Confident Thinking” is a book written to bring about consciousness, to put us in charge, in control, to allow life to vibrate with energy, meaning and joy, to make us the most intimate instrument in life’s endeavors, to assist us to think, feel and behave as we would like to as human beings.

Do not confuse problem-seeking solutions with solutions themselves. Nor should you expect the problem solving to be acquainted in the most intimate terms with the deeply ingrained territory of the subconscious where most of life’s answers exists, but seldom surface. This is the terrain of novelists and speculative philosophers, the world of Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and Nietzsche but not the world of H. G. Wells, Kant, Wittgenstein and Russell.

The aim of science is to note the number of similarities in the behavior of objects and to construct propositions of the greatest degree of generality from which the largest number of such uniformities can be logically deduced. For the novelist and philosopher it is just the opposite. Feelings and introspections do not lend themselves to the rigidity of mathematics, yet science separated from the human 'being' is most real in its unintended consequences.

The novelist and philosopher sets forth, in unintentionally biased language, habits and thoughts, ways of looking at things and reacting to them, talking about his and the experiences of others in ways too close to be arbitrarily discriminated and classified. He is limited, strictly speaking, to what he is aware of and can absorb as a picture of what he perceives is going on. This is what 'to understand' is largely about.

Language describing ordinary experience is employed in the opposite manner of closed scientific language. Feelings and impressions, which in human behavior are most often treated as facts, are integral to normal experience, amounting to the massive integration of data, too ephemeral and ubiquitous to be mounted on the pin of some narrow scientific principle or process.

Language, so used, is not meant to develop an unassailable principle but is intended to communicate relatively stable characteristics of an external world, which forms the frontier of our common experience in a life largely consisting of manipulations.

I am referring to that sensitive self-adjustment to what cannot be measured precisely or weighed exactly or fully described at all, that innate capacity that exists in every individual called imaginative insight, or intuition, at its highest point of genius to which everyone is endowed, being that individual's understanding of life. It is the distinction that exists, for us all, between wisdom and folly.

Confidence is a metaphor for the inflation and deflation that oscillates within human existence, wherein the imagination grows overly luxuriant at the expense of vigorous observation, while wisdom is based on ‘understanding,’ or discerning comprehension rather than simple knowledge.

We live in the age of the professional, where knowledge is power, and 'power' often gets lost in what can be done and what cannot be done. Since education is constructed on what has worked, or knowledge, there exists a rigidity and loyalty to the past. We see this in the failure of our institutions to change with the times, with education still as infallibly structured as if it were the nineteenth century with diplomas and degrees having more currency than what people can do.

Possessing confidence, there is an element of improvisation, of playing by ear, of being able to size up the situation, of knowing when to leap and when to remain still, for which there is no curriculum, no formula, no general recipe, no specific set of skills required in identifying specific situations as instances in which general laws can be substituted for initiative and imaginative intervention.

Confidence is the practical genius that differentiates learners from knowers, and listeners from tellers. It is the difference between people having a center they trust that governs their behavior and directs their actions, and others who lack the capacity for doing anything without a detailed prescription.

When we are on top of things, our parts are all working in harmony with the imaginative music of our souls vibrating with a cadence unique to us. We behave confidently because we are confident. We may not be able to explain it. We need not worry, it is like being able to ride a bike without being able to explain exactly how we can ride a bike or why we prefer the riding

IS THERE A CRISIS IN CONFIDENCE?

President Jimmy Carter got into trouble during his administration during a period of double dip unemployment and double dip inflation by telling the American people in a fireside chat reminiscent of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s during WWII, in a cardigan sweater no less, that we had a “crisis in confidence.” Whether correctly stated or not, the president’s popularity tumbled.

Recently, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a column on how Americans’ self-confidence had also pummeled.

Brooks had asked readers to respond to him on the question of their self-confidence. A mother wrote that she might as well have her vocal cords cut because her children want her to stay calm, talk nice to the point of not wasting their time. A military man claims women shut down women who are confident more than men do. Another woman, a business owner, claims that workers don’t want her to interfere with their dress or manners, much less their work, and prefer her to act as if invisible, blending into the world as passively as wallpaper, more like a lap dog than a border collie. Another person pronounces that all men and women suffer equally from “under-confidence.” Men bluff their way through while women choose to be skeptical and to look for advice or simply remain passive.

In each of these instances, the projection of undernourished personal confidence centered on the need to please others at the expense of pleasing ‘self,’ preferring the role of victim to that of victor.

Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts shows a different aspect of what happens when our confidence deserts us.

Pitts writes of Brenda Heist who showed up at the police station in Key West, Florida stating she was a missing person. Eleven years ago, when the bottom fell out of her marriage, and she was turned down for housing assistance, three strangers found her crying in a park and asked her to hitch a ride with them. From that moment forward, her existence went into a tailspin of pastiche alliances, petty crimes, panhandling, trailer parks, common law marriages, sleeping under bridges, and working as a housekeeper. This lifestyle was mirrored on her recent mug shot, measured against her old driver license photograph. She looked at least a decade older than her actual age.

Pitts believes everyone thinks at one time or another of running from life, but it is just that, the thought and not the act. Yet, tens of thousands of people do it every year. Brenda Heist daughter says her mother can rot in hell, her husband doesn’t want her back, and the saddest part of all, she is so damaged that she doesn’t want herself either. With confidence, we embrace our resistance to life’s challenges and soar over them, but with despair, we run away from life until life catches up with us.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, always one to look on the dour side of things, while not engaging this subject of confidence directly, implies its relevance by default. Her subject is sexual harassment citing a Pentagon study estimating that 26,000 men and women in the military were sexually assaulted in 2012. Only 3,374 incidents were reported, as the majority of victims were afraid to lose a paycheck, while only 238 assailants were convicted. Dowd employed her column to profile United States Air Force Colonel Jeffrey Krusinski accused of sexual battery. Krusinski, it so happens, is in charge of the sexual assault prevention programs for the U.S. Air Force.

Dowd bolstered her column against Krusinski by reminding us of the Thomas-Hill hearings, in which Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was Anita Hill’s boss, and was accused by her of vulgar and insinuating behavior while in his employ. Thomas at the time was the nation’s top enforcer of laws against workplace sexual harassment.

It may surprise the reader but the angels and demons of our nature are often revealed by what we claim to be vehemently against rather than for, taking on a hue that reveals our personal obsessions rather than our high-minded motivations. Be skeptical of the person who crusades against common human failings, because that person may be revealing more naked truth about herself and her biases than those she reproves.

Confidence is an enabling disposition, and as revealed in “Confident Thinking,” exposes culpable behavior for what it is, how it takes hold, and why those who seem the most in control and confident, are more likely out of control and victim to their demons.

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AN OPEN LETTER TO YOUNG PROFESSIONALS!

 AN OPEN LETTER TO YOUNG PROFESSIONALS




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



© May 1, 2013



REFERENCE:



This is a rough draft of a piece to be included in the re-release of "The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain." The book when first published anticipated the dramatic rise of the professional in the workforce without a concomitant passion for the role demands or the recognition (and acceptance) of what that role or those demands would require. These professionals were interested in perks not performance. It was not totally their fault. They had been managed, motivated, manipulated and monitored in a way to make them passive and reactive rather than responsible and accountable. By the irony of this republication, a new generation is coming on the scene and the picture doesn't look to this observer that much different, and thus the reason for this missive to be included in the book.



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If you are nine months and twenty-one years of age, you are the newest generation. If you have just graduated from university, or about to graduate, and cannot find a job, don’t blame your parents, the government, in fact, don’t waste your time in projecting blame. You are into a new era where nobody knows what side is up.



We once thought we were a Christian nation in which everyone had freedom of religion. Now we apologize for calling Christmas, “Christmas,” and Easter, “Easter,” and saying “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Easter.”



We once thought English was our native language and now we apologize for not being able to speak or read Spanish.



We once thought marriage was between a man and a woman, and now we are ashamed to insist on this definition, as our clerics, politicians and media cave into the societal cultural demands to see marriage as otherwise.



We once abhorred premarital sex as much on pragmatic as religious grounds as it led to unwanted pregnancies, venereal diseases and disruptive sensibilities. Our bodies don’t have to be adult but our minds do to cope with life. Now, we feel self-conscious and even ashamed if we disclose we’re not active sexually before we are ready for the emotional baggage that can come with it. Instead, we hook up with relative strangers as if married couples or share our virtues with no social stigma in high school or earlier, and lead sexually active lives seeing no guilt or shame, much less consequences to sexual congress. We see it as being “adult” and sophisticated when this couldn’t be further from the case.

Once it was cool to smoke cigarettes surreptitiously justifying it because our parents did even though we might not yet be in our teens. Once, it was equally cool to have a nip of a beer, wine or whiskey left after our parent’s party before we were of age. Then it was gangbusters when we turned 18 or 21, whatever the legal age for smoking and drinking in our state.



If you are nine months and twenty-one years of age, you don’t have to look too far from where you’re sitting to see a mother or a father, uncle or aunt that has sclerosis, or cirrhosis of the liver, emphysema, coughing spells, unable to walk without a cane, or very far, or has a stint or two in their arteries to keep blood in their bodies flowing, or a double, triple, or quadruple heart bypass operations because after about nine months and twenty-one years, the time you have been alive, Nature’s revenge kicks in and levels loved ones who were simply doing what was cool.



t is not your fault that we are a pacifier nation. You didn’t ask for that pacifier when you cried and were hungry, had a little tummy ache, needed your diaper to be changed, or just felt restless. You couldn’t talk, didn’t have a language yet, but you could cry, as crying was your way to get attention to your discomfiture.



Nor was it your fault that when you were full of zest with an appetite for life and couldn’t sit still and wanted to be doing something, running, jumping, yelling, laughing, talking, shouting at your heart’s content, only to find that this was all wrong; that you were supposed to hold your spirit at bay and behave appropriately at meals, in church, at school, that when adults were talking you were to be seen but not heard, to behave like a mannequin, cute but unobtrusive.



As you reached school age, a new regiment of pacifiers was introduced to quiet your spirit. You now had language. You could process information. Only now you found school more inhibiting to your spirit then had home been. It puzzled you when so many of our spirited playmates simply kowtowed to the demands of their parents, teachers, nuns, priests and ministers. The drill was now to be polite, obedient, punctual, passive, attentive, focused, predictable, and lovable within the confines of well-documented tyrannical policies for behavior.



You had little choice but to rebel, to retrogress to that child before language was your outlet. Only now the pacifier was not the innocuous plastic sucking nipple, but a regiment of Ritalin or Adderall given even to prevent your rambunctious prepubescent spirit from kicking in.



If this were not enough, with no idea what it meant, you were labeled with Hawthorne’s “scarlet letter” in the form of being called an ADD or an ADHD child. With no say in the process, you had entered the world of psychiatric doublespeak and doublethink, where a pound of prevention is worth a ton of cure.



Small wonder by the time you are nine months and twenty-one years of age you have experimented with marijuana and other illegal recreation drugs to reach that same zombie state you remember as a child. If fact, many of these illegal recreational drugs are moving quickly in many states to legalization. Soon, it will be possible to be on a high and have your feet never touch the ground until you die. Of course, chances are you won’t be able to do anything too productive during the interim. But not to worry, psychiatry, medical science and pharmaceutical research is covering your back with apologies and placebos and the rationale that give credence to “Pacifier Nation.” These drugs will soon be labeled as mind expanders as was LSD several generations ago.



We live in an age of excess, that is, two billion souls on the planet do. The other five billion hardly have enough to keep body and soul together.



We in the West and the rising Third World East along with Brazil in South America have gravitated to addiction as the norm. This is not only in the sphere of recreational and prescription drug excess, but also in all our pursuits. We have come to burn the candle at both ends collapsing in the middle with a retinue of socially accepted maladies, including burn out, being bipolar, schizophrenia, asthma, obesity, heart disease, and having some kind of elected surgery which have come to belie what is construed as a state of normalcy. We have legitimized being sick as a socially acceptable way of retreat from the grind, or from life itself. On the other hand, should anyone initiate such a retreat, say “dropping out” while being totally healthy, chances are it would be whispered that he or she was sick in the head. This is further evidence that you at nine months and twenty-years of age are inheriting an upside down world. .



I doubt if anyone would suggest that this electronic boom we now enjoy was inevitable, but I do, admittedly, in retrospect. It took the renegade spirit of those of “Ritalin Nation” babies to ultimately rebel from that regiment and the society that sponsored it once they were of age.



We become what we think, but we also become what we hate as well. I imagine these Ritalin junkies couldn’t wait to escape the regiment of medication. They went off to college, and saw that sucked, looked around and decided what else could they do. They had always liked games, the more weird and demanding the better. So, they gravitated to crude games and toys on printed wire circuit boards, and voila! They were home!



A generation or two ago, those of Ritalin Nation were not serious students of anything but opportunists. Freud would say they weren’t looking for a career, weren’t looking to contribute to the common good. They were looking for a new pacifier that would pass muster and be conceived and perceived as something of value added, something that would allow them to retrogress to that earlier period of pacifier contentment.



And voila! Throwing caution to the wind and convention aside, they embarrassed Big Blue’s IBM and GM’s and GE’s lock on commerce, and miraculously turned toys into tools, and then tools back into toys as constant pacifier companions not unlike that plastic nipple remembered affectionately so long ago. God is no longer in the machine but in the latest electronic wonder, and as they say in sport, “You’ve not seen anything yet!”



It doesn’t stop with what we have in our ear, on our lap or in our hand, always something because we cannot stand not to be doing something, listening to something, or chatting with someone 24/7 because we cannot stand for one second to be alone. The fact that you can probably identify with this temperament shows how pervasive the condition.



My point is how can you ever relax if you are always on. We have only so much psychic as well as physical energy. Just as matter can neither be created nor destroyed but only changed in its state of existence, so also is the case with us. You cannot cheat or change Nature. In Nature everything is connected to everything else. Everything in Nature has to go somewhere. Nature knows best. There are no free lunches in Nature. Science has proven this on innumerable occasions yet people try.



Athletes take steroids to get an edge, which destroys as it builds muscle and ultimately leads to entropic damage and even on occasion to an early death. Now we have energy drinks to enhance workers’ performance but with no idea what it is doing to their bodies. With food manufacturers, the worry is not what is ethical but what is legal. This finds them producing candy coated caffeine capsules or caffeine loaded energy drinks, and advertising them as safe as drinking water.



You may ignore these references as the utterances of a cranky old man, but few would deny we are in unchartered waters with little more than our optimism and hubris in support of our fancies. The world is quickly moving away from a white American-European dominated society, which is inevitable. What is not ineluctable is to go passively forward with no sense that there is any point of going against the current, when there is, and the reason for this open letter. You of nine months and twenty-one years of age can change the course of history if you but have the will to do so.



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If you are nine months and twenty-one years of age, you may be an unwed mother, an absent father; you may be into drugs, alcohol, gambling, licentiousness or a myriad of counterproductive excesses that everyone reading this of any age knows of such hazards either personally, or within their family history or amongst their friends.





If you are using the shibboleths of codes to establish distinction from older generations, know all the celebration and integration, all the electronic Aps to networking, all the apprehension and disenchantment, actually differs little with that of your elders, as there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to fear, self-disgust, self-loathing and self-doubt, much less to isolation, disconnection and loneliness. We are a social animal but we need breathing room, too, which comes only when we have had some time with ourselves, alone, something that in the present age is in short supply.



In every age in the marketplace of ideas, despair resides, but there is no law that says you must buy into the despair because seemingly everyone else does. Existentially, self-alienation differs little from one generation to the next. It is just given different names: “the lost generation,” “the beat generation,” “the baby boomers,” the “yuppies,” “the me generation,” and so on.



At one time the greatest form of subtle torture was to strap a person to a chair to the constant dripping of water with no recourse to do anything about it but go mad. Today, there is no need to strap anyone to a chair because the constant drip through a myriad of media outlets, not to mention the personal ones as well, texting and tweeting, disenfranchises us from our normal lights. The irony is that no one notices as they are strapped voluntarily to the same kinds of electronic devices, and I haven’t even mentioned the subliminal torment that is a constant cacophonic roar to our subconscious.



Consequently, we go forward looking for answers outside ourselves when they all exist within us. We attempt to be everyone’s friend ending up being no one’s friends, because when we try to be everything to everyone we end up being nothing to anyone, including ourselves. It is a hard idea to digest but not everyone will ever love us; nor can we solve anyone’s problems but our own



Each generation looks expectantly to its elders with the demand, “Show me something new?” Well, there isn’t anything new. Despite all the technological progress of one generation to the next, people remain essentially the same only the toys change.



Each generation experiences success and failure, surprise and disappointment, pain and pleasure in the moment, and each generation differs as to how it embraces or rejects that experience. There is a dread of every generation to contemplate the future or to deny its hold on them.



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If you think this is my preamble to give you some sage advice, and how to deal with the future, you would be wrong. Instead, I have some questions I would like to ask you.



What is it you would like to do?



Why would you like to do that rather than something else?



What is the relationship of your essence to your personality?



Chances are you don’t have a clue as to the answer to the first two questions. Few of us did when we were your age. We stumbled into the future ending up doing something or other, which proved either adequate or inadequate, more a matter of attitude than aptitude.



Our problem in my generation was more a matter of the third question, which is a balance or imbalance between “who we are” (essence) and “who we think we are” (personality).



Essence is what you are born with; personality is what you acquire. Essence is your DNA, which is cumulative, not only of your parents, but also of many generations in your family tree that preceded them, and contributed to the human being you happen to be in terms of potential. Essence is your exclusivity, your uniqueness. Essence you own. Personality is what you only rent because you cannot own what you can only acquire.



You may be inclined to disregard your essence, your potential, because of what sociologist Dr. Billy G. Gunter calls “ambient deficiency motivation.” ADM finds many of us, strangely, attracted to what we are not or what is the antithesis of what we actually are. That is to say, the emphasis is placed on our personality, or what seems thrilling or importance or being with it, in a word, being esteemed. Consequently, in this rag tag bone of the heart, we may be attracted to what we are not and what we do not own and cannot rightly possess.



For example, the romanticism of being a priest may have special appeal to the profligate sinner; the idea of being an academic may fascinate when you have little interest in study or reading books; the desire to have a position of authority and be your own boss may be precluded by your incapacity for risk, responsibility or accountability, or you may aspire to be a parent to have your ego ideal manifested in another human being, but lack an interest in what parenting requires.



Essence, however, is not enough. We must also develop our personality. We start acquiring personality from birth. As a baby, we discover what works with our caregivers and what doesn’t; what results in satisfaction and what does not. The baby calibrates the benefit to pouting, tantrums, and tears, and uses them judiciously to its desired ends.



We also learn the power of guilt, shame and embarrassment in getting what we want, which is not necessarily congruent with what we need to grow and develop consistent with our essence.



It is no accident that several generations since the middle of the 20th century have been suspended in terminal adolescence as a result of learned helplessness, looking outside themselves for their security and total well being.



Our bloated and deficit economy is the best indicator of what those of nine months and twenty-one years of age are now to inherit. True, like Kafka’s Mr. K, they can claim they have done nothing wrong, but that will not augur well for them in the future.



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If I am advocating anything here, it is better balance between our essence and personality. The fact that you as a young professional are entering a celebrity culture suggests that personality has become dominant at the expense of essence. It is now more important "who you are" than "what you are." The evidence is rather apparent when you consider the many masks we are forced to wear, as we go through life to accommodate constantly changing role demands (our jobs) and self-demands (our self-regard).



Masks are so much a part of our culture and personality that the masks we wear in public differ little from the masks we wear in private. In other words, we are constantly on, constantly adjusting our masks to be consistent with how we perceive the situation. We are still calibrating like that baby we were nine months and twenty-one years ago. Seldom, if ever, do we abandon our masks for fear others will see us as we are. Indeed, we change our masks so quickly, in private as well as public, that the naked eye cannot capture the change.



Some of these masks work for us, at one stage of our lives, but not at another stage. It is beholden to us to know which masks are most effective and in which situations, and to adjust these masks accordingly. To take the stand, that “I don’t wear a mask,” or to declare wearing a mask is disingenuous is to be naïve to the extreme. You know people are talking about masks when they say about another person not present, “He’s a nice guy but just a tic off.”



If this seems confounding, take heart in knowing that the mask you wear will consistently be appropriate if you don’t let external factors dictate your internal integrity. You have your best interests always at heart when you have a sense of humor about yourself and start treating yourself as your very best friend.



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