AN OPEN LETTER TO YOUNG
PROFESSIONALS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 11, 2013
[1] REFERENCE:
This is a rough draft of a piece to be included in the re-release of "The
Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain." (1995)(2013)
The book when first published anticipated the rise of the professional in
the workforce without a passion for the role demands or recognition of
what that role would require. These
professionals were interested in perks more than 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 responsive
and responsible. As this second editions
is being released, a new generation is coming on the scene and the picture
doesn't look too different, and thus the reason for this inclusion in the
book.
* * *
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 with blame. You are into a new era where nobody knows what side
is up.
The sharp division between values, natural and moral, even the
assumptions of values may not only be different in principle but incompatible with
the past for there is a contradiction between what people expect and experience
today versus what tradition dictates.
Tradition is not open or malleable to change as the times demand. This is illustrated by its obdurate maintenance
of the common good when the shift is now clearly to personhood.
Through no fault of young people a dagger has separated the world
before and after 1968 as the American Century ended a little early in that year. Young people are the inheritors of that development.
Since 1968, we have had the Vietnam War, the first war we ever lost,
the exodus of young males to Canada to avoid the draft, Woodstock and the Hippie, and Yuppie
generations, followed by the X, Y and Me generations, the OPEC embargo, double
dip inflation and unemployment, the Contract with America of the Republican
Party in Congress, the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, two Iraq Wars and
a War in Afghanistan, the War on Crime, the War on Drugs, two attacks on the
Twin Towers of New York City, ultimately demolishing the towers killing nearly
3,000, the War on Terror, the Civil Rights Movement, the Feminist Movement, the
Gay Rights Movement, the HIV epidemic, Enron debacle, the ambivalence on 11
million illegals and immigrant policy, the economic crash on Wall Street and
the real estate meltdown in 2008 nearly leading to the Second Great Depression,
the bailout of Wall Street, and the automotive industry, the election of the
first African American President, the economic tilt from the United States to
China the Pacific Rim Countries and Brazil, the Information Revolution and Information
Age with the creation of the Internet and handheld devices to allow instant
communications, the Arab Spring, the collapse of the management paradigm, the
rise of the professional worker, the decline of the blue-collar working middle
class, the self-estrangement of institutional society from family, school, workplace,
church and state at all levels of interface, and these are only a few of the highlights of the cataclysmic
change since 1968. It appears as if no
one is in charge as the country revolves around business as usual practices
with infallible authority with no one willing or able to lead as everything seemingly
stays the same, misses the changes and the future is left up for grabs.
There appears a frantic search for anchors in dogmatic public and
private policy from the pronouncements of think tanks, prophets, soothsayers,
pundits, gurus or those in touch with unseen forces. The rational and irrational have collided to
produce an alchemy of contempt, conflict, cynicism, disgust, anxiety,
depression and loss. We are not happy
campers. We have lost our moral compass
and our way.
In spite of this, the common mantra is, “Not to worry! No reason for fury!” National ineptitude, incompetence,
inconsistency and failure ride on the optimistic hubris of the American
psyche. Rationalism not reason seems the
order of the day.
Young people are coming of age in a barren period of American history. Americans are exhausted and more importantly,
so is the planet. There is little point
in looking for a priori truth for the past was built on a porous foundation of
explanatory models that provide the rhetoric and rationale to explain away
reality. New values need to be created
out of this wasteland.
Nothing works anymore! We continue
to insist on two-dimensional strategies to solve three-dimensional problems,
and wait for these strategies to work, which of course they never do. We thought that science was guided by ethics and
would discover the key to Mother Nature, that politics was science as it
applied to groups, and that morality was a kind of geography of the mind. Leadership, we find, is necessary but not
sufficient to accomplish this task because everyone is a leader or no one is. Missing is the will and the intelligence to
recognized that one size never fits all if it fits anything.
We confuse means and ends and have ever since Machiavelli if not
before. Following Plato, the belief has persisted that ends could be discovered
only by specially trained experts, by sages, divinely inspired seers,
philosophers, scientists, psychologists, the intelligentsia, by people like you
fresh with your college degrees in hand.
Virtue was perceived as knowledge, values as action, and who better than
the knowledgeable to power that process to action than the most virtuous.
Through the ages we have seen this is not always true if, indeed, it
ever was as among these ranks have often been the most shallow, pathetic,
naïve, and self-deceiving. They have
plummeted the economy into collapse and the nation into unnecessary wars.
This destructive element persists under hyperboles that declare groups “the
best and the brightest,” or someone “genius” or “brilliant” or “gifted.” Intelligence is not what it “is.” Intelligence is what it “does.” When
sobriquets are surrogate to “is-isms” than deeds are reduced to furniture of
the mind.
When we fail, and young people are entering a spirited world that knows
much more about failure than success, group identity has a tendency to move
from one fanatic movement to another.
This has exhausted people and the planet. It is time for a new Age of Reason with fresh
minds competing in the marketplace of ideas.
It is time to leave the redundant institutional programming of the 19th
century and the bellicose self-flagellation and hubris of the 20th
century
It was the Age of Reason in the 17th and 18th that
gave birth to the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the Industrial
Revolution when pursuit of liberty, fraternity and equality were the battle cry. But, alas, even then as remarkable as that
age, it failed to provide happiness and freedom for everyone, and led to the
American Civil War. Likewise, as much as
we might congratulate our times for the Information Age, much of the originality
of design belongs to that period and not ours.
Modern thought, science and philosophy owe much to these pathfinders. We have been too busy exploiting their work
to ponder originality in our own.
Let us consider for a moment a few new realities that those of
twenty-one years and nine months might note.
·
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 that 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 emotional development of our sensibilities. Our bodies
don’t have to be adult but our minds do to cope with life.
·
We once thought it normal to restrain sexual
activity but now we feel self-conscious and even ashamed if we do. 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 fact.
·
We once thought it 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.
·
We once thought only celebrities were into
drugs. Then all at once someone we knew
not yet in their teens were using drugs, and then it seemed everyone was using
drugs, although illegal.
·
We couldn’t wait until we were 18 or 21,
depending on what the legal age was in our state to go gangbusters and drink
alcohol legally.
Now, 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, brother or sister, or best friend who has cirrhosis of the liver,
emphysema, sexually transmitted disease, 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.
It is not your fault that you were born into “Pacifier Nation,” which
has a tolerance for everything except the courage to be intolerant of anything,
especially something harmful to your health.
Chances are you were introduced early in life to a plastic nipple pacifier
instead of a mother’s breast or a warm bottle of milk to keep you quiet and
apparently content. This has been
magnified to the point that as Pacifier Nation we have fast foods, fast cars, fast
boats, fast life styles, fast morals and indiscriminate appetites as long as it
is more.
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 home had 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 or draconian policies
for behavior.
You had little choice but to rebel, or 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 ton of prevention was worth a pound of
cure.
Small wonder now that you are nine months and twenty-one years of age
you have probably experimented with marijuana and other illegal recreation
drugs to reach that same zombie state you remember as a child. In fact, many of
these illegal recreational drugs are moving quickly in many states to
legalization, as the “Sins of the Parents” who instituted this regiment of Ritalin
and Adderall don’t know what else to do but to capitulate.
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. 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 for the Haight Ashbury crowd of
San Francisco.
We live in an age of excess in which one billion more souls are on the
planet since 1968 or two generations ago. You are the fortunate member of the
two billion souls who share 80 percent of the wealth and natural resources
while the other five billion souls share 20 percent or less of the world’s
wealth and resources. We have conflict
and terror for this reason and this reason, alone, no matter how much the political
and economic dialectics rotate around the axis of “us against them.”
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 drugs, but in all our pursuits and
endeavors. We have come to burn the candle at both ends collapsing it in the
middle with a retinue of socially accepted maladies, including burn out, drop
out, depression, anxiety, bipolar or schizophrenia, asthma, obesity, heart
disease, and having some kind of elected surgery to look thinner, younger or
more attractive so as never to grow old and therefore never have to grow up. 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 will generate whispers that you are sick in the
head. In a word, you young people are about
to take ownership of this upside down world.
It took the renegade spirit of those of “Ritalin Nation” babies to
ultimately rebel from a regimented society to sponsor and create the
Information Age that we now enjoy. Ironically,
one pacifier has replaced another, as the digital electronic mobile has
replaced the plastic nipple.
We become what we think, but we also become what we hate. They are two sides of the same coin, as the
moon has a bright and dark side, so do we.
Ritalin junkies, it can be imagined, couldn’t wait to escape the
regiment of medication. The Jobs and Gates went off to college, and saw that
sucked, looked around and decided what else could they do. They had always
liked games, the weirder 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, they were looking to escape the common good. They were looking for a
new pacifier that was of their own invention that would allow them to
retrogress to that earlier period of pacifier contentment.
Throwing caution to the wind and convention aside, they embarrassed Big
Blue’s IBM and GM and GE who were lock stepping to the past, and turned toys
into tools that could be their constant pacifier 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.
How can anyone always be on? We
have only so much psychic and physical energy. Just as matter can neither be
created nor destroyed but only changed so it is with us. You cannot cheat
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 on occasion 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.
·
You may be an unwed mother, or an absent unaccountable
father.
·
You may be into drugs, alcohol, gambling,
licentiousness or a myriad of other counterproductive excesses.
·
You may be using the shibboleths of codes to
establish distinction from older generations.
·
You may know all the integrations, all the
electronic Apps to networking that differentiate you from your elders.
·
You may feel self-disgust, self-loathing,
self-doubt, isolated, disconnected, or alone.
That is because you are a stranger to yourself and have not accepted
yourself as you are. The way you are is
the way you have chosen to be, and if it isn’t working for you, only you can chose
to change, no one else can do that for you.
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,” “hippies,” 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 to 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, not to mention the subliminal torment
that is a constant cacophonic roar to our supple 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. 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 and tools 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.
If this sound like a preamble to some sage advice, and how to deal with
the future, you would be wrong. Instead, it formulates questions that you
should ask yourself because you, alone, are the source of the answers:
·
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
(genetic gifts) to your personality (acquired tastes)?
Chances are you been too preoccupied to the answer 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 chance than choice, more a product of attitude than aptitude.
The problem of my generation, the era of the Great Depression, was more
a matter of the third question, as we were pretty ignorant of balance or
imbalance between “who we were and what we could do” (essence) and “who we thought
we were supposed to be” (personality).
We stayed pretty much within the white lines that were assumed to be our
designation which meant doing pretty much what our parents had done and were.
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 the antithesis
of what we are or could be.
·
The profligate sinner to the priesthood.
·
The common criminal to law enforcement.
·
The CSI junkie to R&D chemistry.
·
The wallflower to radio/television shock jock or
comedy.
·
The town gossip to journalism.
·
The inveterate liar to writing novels.
·
The constant screw up to management.
·
The spendthrift to accounting, banking or
insurance.
·
The poor student to teaching.
·
The resentful of authority to politics.
The current emphasis is on personality, fitting
in, or being consistent with the prevailing norm. This is fad driven, and fads have a short
shelf life. Consequently, when you could be almost anything in this rag tag
bone of the heart world of ours many are attracted to what everyone else seems
to think important instead of their obvious gifts.
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 sometimes throughout life.
The child also learns the power of guilt, shame and embarrassment in
getting what is wanted, which is not necessarily congruent with what is needed
to grow and develop consistent with 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 direction, security and satisfaction.
Our bloated and deficit economy is the collective product of this
mindset on a national basis, and an example of the culture, climate and
character of the world you are about to inherit.
If anything is advocated here, it is a better balance between essence
and personality. You are entering a celebrity driven culture where personality
(fitting in) has become dominant at the expense of essence. This translates
into it being more important "who you are" than "what you
are." It is 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 that we are constantly changing
masks in private as well as public to the point that it is hard to work out
what is the mask and what isn’t. In other words, 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 at one stage but not at another. It is
beholden to the mask changer to know which masks is being worn and in which
situations, and to adjust these masks accordingly. Some might claim, “I don’t
wear a mask!” You know they are talking
about masks when they say, “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.
* * *
[1]
The relevance of this was brought home today (June 12, 2013) by New York Times syndicated columnist David Brooks Op Ed piece on the NSA leaker of secret documents to the press by high school drop out Edward Snowden. Brooks sees Snowden as part of an unfortunate trend of the age -- The Atomization of Society. I see him as the personification of the rise of personhood among young people in the vacuum of duplicity of a paranoid nation. Brooks writes, "Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good." As the Peripatetic Philosopher, I track and have been tracking the incipient movement to complacency and complicity of spineless leadership over the past several decades. Snowden, in my view, is not the exception but the rule of young people, and scolding him for being "atomizing" will not change the trend. The end of duplicity and chicanery in all institutional life would be a powerful first step. But we must first get rid of two-dimensional problem solving and entertain three-dimensional thinking. Buying and selling fear is two-dimensional as justification for positive freedom (See Isaiah Berlin's "Four Essays on Liberty," 1969).
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