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