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


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