WHY I WRITE!

WHY I WRITE

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

© March 28, 2014

 

REFLECTIONS THIS MORNING:

To all of you who read my blog, and you are on every continent of the globe, my general comment to your question of why do I write is that I write because I can.  As long as my mind works, I will continue to write. 

I don't know how my work will be received.  Notice I say in the future tense.  I’m living in the past imperfect and will not be around for the future perfect tense. 

Ergo, the reader decides in this present past imperfect world what value my words and ideas have to him or her. 

If my writing doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you.  Go on to something else. 

I'm hearing from some that my books are difficult.  They are not meant to be difficult. 

True, some might be less taxing if the reader knows a little Freudian psychology.  But I sense that is not the problem.  The problem is people don’t want to get under the hood of their existence and look at how dirty and poorly maintained is that engine.  I  have the hood up and am always looking underneath at its corruption, wondering how it manages to turn over much less run.

Yes, I am something of a fan of Goethe, Camus, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Shakespeare, Joyce, Isaiah Berlin, Emerson, and others, but my ideas come out of my own life and experience, and are the foundation of my works.

I don’t like injustice, and I know a lot about it because I was reared Irish Roman Catholic and born on the wrong side of the tracks.  I am "shanty Irish" as opposed to "lace curtain" Irish.  By the accident of my circumstances, I rose rather high in a couple of Fortune 500 companies, but never joined the club.

One of the things I’ve never quite understood is this:

Why do successful people still have to bully people who have no power? 

When they do it in my presence, they have an enemy for life.  I identify with people who have no power.  They are my people.  I come from them.  Yes, I've had the titles and the perks and the privileges, but I have never left my roots.  

I have tried to establish with my works the foundation that leads to thought.  I have never been interested in creating "answer books."  I have no answers.  I am not you and am not privy to your life or experience, but you are.  I can tell you what I've learned and perhaps it may resonate with you and your experience.

Stated another way, I am not in the business of winning friends and influencing people, but again, hopefully, getting others to think in terms of their own experience and lights. 

Today there is a disturbing column in the newspaper on the incredible poor return to many college graduates on their investment in higher education.  The writer looks at the bottom feeders not the cream eaters at the top. 

The writer suggests it would have been better for these people to put their money in the bank or stock market, at least then the “Return on Investment” would be somewhat positive, as the evidence he cites indicates negative ROIs.

We have made two major wrong turns when it comes to a college education:

We have insisted, as a society, that everyone should be a college graduate.

We have made a college education the equivalent of vocational job training which has nothing to do with enlightenment other than as skills training for the Information Age.

One hundred years ago, when the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, public education was made compulsory so that workers could read and write and do simple mathematical calculations.  It had nothing to do with cultural enhancement. 

It is clear that we have never escaped this mechanistic model of society much as we protest, much as we shout about the best and the brightest, and so on.  Consequently, you can be making $1 billion a year and you’d rather see an NFL game than go to the opera. 

My writing makes no reader comfortable with this disposition.  I do this by profiling the contributing elements to the coarseness of our society.  By our cultural programming, we have developed a vicarious appetite for violence in all its imaginable forms. 

We love murder and mayhem in our novels, television and films, and the gorier the better, and then we wonder why we are the way we are.  Even our comedic novels, television and films follow the same format, mechanistic. 

My writing attempts to be transitional and transformational.  Whether it succeeds or not, only the reader can decide.  Take my recent novel.

GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA is not about murder and mayhem, but about life and sex and religion and work and betrayal, all that business under that hood I mentioned earlier that isn’t mechanistic but intuitive and counterintuitive, where slimy reality lives and the human spirit breaks down.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Devlin tests that theory in Green Island with his personal and professional life on a collision course, showing every sign that he is able to function at a high level, only to have the denouement of the story suggest otherwise.  If you read it, let me know what you think. 

Incidentally, Fitzgerald’s boast proved suspect as his own life was cut short due to his inability to manage his addiction to alcohol and maintain his writing career as a novelist.  He died at age 44.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

COMING HOME!

COMING HOME

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

© March 24, 2014

 

On August 27, 1990, I had just completed a book that had been germinating in me for many years.  I called it “Work Without Managers,” and it was published later that fall. 

But on this date, my mind was not one of satisfaction or relief.  It was a call from my sister, Pat Waddell that my boyhood friend, Bobby Witt, had died.  He was in his fifties, a Hall of Fame high school basketball coach, and a high school all-stater in the same sport, playing with me.  We played high school football, baseball, and ran track together.  We also lived three houses apart in the shadow of the Clinton County Courthouse.

I, also in my fifties, had retired for the second time, the first time in my mid-thirties.  Life had always been a chore for me, which had nothing to do with success after success.  Perhaps that was because success also meant stress after stress, which for me led to distress. 

I’ve always been a bit of a grind.  I suppose because I’m not too confident, always felt that I was one great big phony, putting on a front to being what I wasn’t and pretending to feel what I didn’t.  My happiest times have always been alone, not with people, yet my many careers have always put me in the center of a lot of people doing what people in such centers do, which is pretend.

It got to me so badly when I was in my mid-thirties that I turned my back on what was considered a “brilliant career” and financial security to sit around and read books, write poetry, play tennis, watch the ships come into port and leave, watch the people frantically rushing about, thankful that I was no longer on that freight train.

Late in life, in my early fifties, I discovered something that I thought only existed in books, love.  I met a creature that was so real she was surreal, and I have spent these many years since with her.  I was married to her when my friend died, she a generation younger than I am, had little sense of why I was so blue.  At least, that is what I thought.  She said simply, “Jim, your mind is just going home.”

That was a most kind way of saying I was thinking of my mortality.  No doubt I was thinking of my beginnings because I was moving towards my end.  The death of my friend was a stark reminder of that fact.  My beautiful Betty didn’t say that because she is far too kind, but that was the essence of her comment.

Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer points out that when we reach an advanced age, and that age can be in our 40s, 50s or beyond, the mind is given to looking back over one’s lifetime, as I was doing and didn’t know it. 

I was with Bobby Witt again, he was pitching and I was catching, I was handing the baton off to him in a relay race in track, he was going around end with the football in a key game with Davenport, that we won, and I was his lead blocker, we were sneaking into the professional baseball game, going over the fence, we were hanging out at Rastrelli’s  having a chocolate marshmallow peanut sundae with a cherry on top.   We were at the movies seeing our fighting G.I.’s in Iwo Jima or Bataan during the war, watching Dean Burridge, our coach at St. Patrick’s, star in football and basketball at Clinton High, serving Mass together for Father Harvey Finefield, or listening to Sister Cecile read “Brass Knuckles” to the class, or letting us listen to a couple innings of the World Series with broadcaster Red Barber. 

Bobby would never go to the YMCA because “Father Finefield said that was not a place for Catholic boys,” but I went there all the time.  Bobby was equally poor as I was but he never worked, and I always did, with a newspaper route, or stacking shelves at the A&P Supermarket.  Bobby was also brighter than I was, but he never read books, and I was always reading.  He found it funny with my head always in a book, and told me so.  But he always had his head in some sporting magazine.  He wanted to be a Major League Baseball Player, but he had two things working against him, living in Iowa where we had eight months of winter, and seemingly two weeks of summer, and what baseball scout would ever think of coming to Clinton, Iowa? 

Bobby went to college on a basketball scholarship that paid everything.  I went to college working five summers in a chemical plant, and on a merit academic scholarship that only paid tuition.  He became a coach and didn’t leave the Midwest, not even when he was in the army.  I became a chemist, which was not a good fit, went into the navy and spent two years on active duty in the Mediterranean, and that changed everything for me.  While most guys hit the beach and got drunk and laid, I went on tours, finding myself something of a culture vulture.  I wanted to know everything about everything that ever happened to my native continent, the home of my ancestors in Ireland and Norway. 

In the process, I wrote copious letters finding that my da was right – I didn’t write a very good letter – but passion doesn’t always burn with good sense.  I wanted to be a writer!  But of course, without any talent, only this strange passion. 

Since I couldn’t write well, and had to work, I had to substitute reading successful authors and their biographies as surrogate for my writing aspirations, finding that many writers, perhaps most, were as confused about their talent or lack of talent as I was about mine.  I found most writers wanted desperately to connect with other people so that they could in turn connect with themselves.  I never read a serious writer who was not plagued with that malady.

All of this strange thinking was tripping through my head as I thought about my boyhood friend who was no longer with us. 

Schopenhauer claimed everything that happens in our lifetime -- everything! – has a consistent order even when it seems it doesn’t, and that in that order there is a plan, and that plan is as if it were composed by a novelist. 

Things that seem accidental, hurtful, shameful, discouraging, regrettable, surprising, he said, things that seem to have little moment are indispensable factors in the composition of our own unique plot. 

Aspects of ourselves of which we are conscious, that become conscious to us when we think of our dreams, are part of a grand design that is recorded in our unconscious and composed by the will within us.

A shock to our system finds us going home, as my wife Betty suggested, which was obvious to her when I was mooning over the loss of my friend.  It was my mortality coming to the fore.  It was also the process of coming home surfacing to take charge of my attention. 

Life constantly blows us off course and into troubled waters that are of little consequences in the scheme of things, but alas, we make them momentous when they are only moments. 

Coming home reorients us back to ourselves recapturing the essence that has made us unique from everyone else, a uniqueness that cannot be dissuaded by someone saying “you have no talent,” or “you don’t even write a good letter,” or “you’ll never amount to anything,” or any number of other discouraging things, things, unfortunately, that our minds are so ready to accept as fact when they couldn’t be more fictive.

Three years ago last February I lost a daughter to a hit-and-run driver as she was crossing a street in Pinellas County, Florida.  That was different than my reaction to my boyhood friend's death.  He was a friend.  My daughter was part of the chemistry of my soul. 

Some writers would turn that pain into a book, but I instead savored it then as I do now, as it is a connection that has no interruption.  Bobby was my past, and my mind drifted to those halcyon days of that quiet time.  Jeannie was my life with another face.  She was never quiet, not in her mother, and never during life, and she is not quiet in my soul now. 

There was no pretend in that girl.  As my granddaughter, Rachel, might say, “Jeannie had no filter.”  She said what was on her mind without editing.  There wasn’t an expletive that she didn’t know, and couldn’t bring to the fore creatively at a moment’s notice.  She could make a sailor blush. 

Strangely, I had an unease with who I am and who I purport to be with Bobby, but not with Jeannie.

Any parent who has lost a child knows exactly what I am talking about.  Only the real is remembered, and it is in more than three dimensions. 

There are no words to describe the hurt or the joy or the love that reverberates in your soul.  There is no language to remind you of coming home again to nestle that child in your arms. 

With Bobby Witt there are coherent moments but with Jeannie there is only loss.  Memory of Bobby moved me to eventually write IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003) about our days as children.  Jeannie death recaptured something that was missing in my memory of that childhood, that is, my life with her moment to moment in joy and sorrow, frustration and disappointment, but always, love.  Bobby gave me eyes to see my childhood self.  Jeannie circled deeper into my soul to reveal the child in the man, and the adult in the child with eyes that looked down from above on us both.

CRIMEA VIS-A-VIS TEXAS! IT'S A MATTER OF CULTURE!

CRIMEA VIS-À-VIS TEXAS

IT’S A MATTER OF CULTURE!

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

© March 19, 2014

 

Like many others of the United States and Europe, I have watched developments in the Ukraine relating to Crimea.  The saber rattling of the West and Russia seem redundant as well as disturbing against the inconclusive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Today, it appears the Ukraine has decided to accede Crimea to Russia, after the referendum in Crimea, and so momentarily we have détente. 

In the end, it’s a matter of culture. 

People, wherever they are, whoever they are, don’t want to be other than what they are, and what they are has much to do with history and culture.

Despite the truth of this people are often caught in the crossfire and become collateral damage when ideologies and geopolitical interests clash like warring children. 

That is happening in Syria.  It could still happen in the Ukraine, and for what purpose?  One day Syria will again be a peaceful place, the cradle of civilization, but not before hundreds of thousand, even millions are driven from their homes or killed, and they have done nothing wrong.

Journalists chase hard facts with entertaining fictions, which gravitate to infomercials, 24/7, tiring our minds and sensitivities to the point we neither trust cable nor network news despite all the pretty faces and serious minds that claim to be in the know. 

Media have become extensions of corporate speak, which measures value in terms of profit not prudence.  We have media all-the-time or too much too many too soon.  So, what choice do we have?  We can relate to people as persons, connect with them, and rely on the hard lessons learned in life that come to us out of the blue.  This is one of mine.

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 “Don’t judge our culture by your culture for what is true of yours is not true of ours, and what is true of ours is not true of yours.”

This statement was provoked when I was traveling for my company about the globe in my capacity as an executive problem solver of customers’ complaints.  My internship had been as a bench chemist, chemical sales engineer, and field manager, where I developed the reputation as a listener to ferret out “people problems” relating to customer concerns.  At the time, I had no formal training in industrial and organizational psychology, but learned later I was practicing the art without portfolio when I returned to university to take my Ph.D. in that field. 

The referenced statement to culture came about while visiting bauxite refineries in Jamaica, traveling with my aide, in the company of the chief chemist of our customer, who was driving.  My aide remarked to the chemist sometime after we had left Kingston to travel into the interior of this island country, “I’ve never seen so many disadvantaged people in my life.  It’s pathetic the way they are forced to live, isn’t it?”

The chemist, black, a Ph.D. graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, slowed the car down and looked to the back seat where my aide was sitting.  “Now how am I meant to interpret that remark?”

“Well, isn’t it obvious, these people are wretchedly poor, living in ghetto like conditions, aren’t they?”

“Define poor for me, young man.”

Now nervous, knowing he had put his foot in his mouth, he retreated into silence.

“I suppose you are referring to the shabby huts, the disabled vehicles in their gardens, the debris that seems everywhere on the streets, am I right?”  My aide still remained quiet.  “Do you think them unhappy, do you think they would prefer living in a penthouse on Park Avenue in New York City?”

“I didn’t mean anything, sir.”

“Of course not, you were simply expressing your American ignorance.  I am quite familiar with American ignorance.  I spent eight years in your country submerged in it while attending university.  You perceive we Jamaicans, what was your word, yes, ‘disadvantaged,’ because we don’t live tidy lives like you Americans do. 

“Let me tell you something, young man, don’t judge another man’s culture by your own.  What he values is not likely to be valued by you, or understood in terms familiar to you.  But make no mistake.  What he values goes back millenniums.     

“What is true of his is culture is not likely true of yours; what is true of yours is not likely true of his,” he repeated.  “Hard as it may be for you to see this, but I can tell you these Jamaicans don’t envy you, or anything you are or have.  They might however feel contempt for your arrogance.”

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This came to mind as the headlines in print, television and the Internet continued to bombard my psyche, always painting Vladimir Putin’s actions in Crimea in terms of Adolf Hitler’s march into the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia in 1938.  Simplistic as these scare tactics, I am appalled how quickly people I respect echo these sentiments as if they are puppets on a string.

Sixty years ago Crimea was part of Russia’s USSR.  This was so until Nikita Khrushchev summarily transferred it to the Soviet’s Ukraine.  

Putin is no saint in this affair, but the wind seems to be at his back, as over 60 percent of Crimea’s population is Russian speaking and do not appear unhappy with how last Sunday’s referendum turned out.

Historians trace many of the problems of today in terms of a “clash of cultures.”  These clashes have often been aggravated in no small way by how the victors of wars in the twentieth century divided the spoils of war, creating permanent geopolitical messes.   Peoples gravitate to their cultures expressed in language, religion, values, beliefs, and histories.  Europe and the Middle East were remapped after WWI and WWII.  Syria today is no exception.  The natural was thus perverted by unnatural partitioning and such wombs never heal. 

Historian David Lee McMullen says, with regards to Crimea, it goes back much further than the twentieth century.  His column is titled, “Crimea War echo heard 160 years later” (Tampa Bay Times, March 10, 2014) to illustrate this fact. 

The Crimea War of the 1850s was a culture war fought between Imperial Russia and the forces of Great Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire.  While on the one hand, it was fought to protect Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, on the other, it was also a dispute between Russia and France over the rights of Russian Orthodox versus Roman Catholics in the Holy Land.  Seven hundred years before it was the Holy Crusades fought for similar reasons.

Professor McMullen gets under the headlines of a “clash of cultures” that drives such clashes.  After the nineteenth century Crimean War, which lasted only two years, Imperial Russia was economically spent and abandoned Sevastopol, losing its warm water port on the Black Sea. 

The Soviet Union got it back after WWII, due to the cunning of Joseph Stalin, to become part of the “Iron Curtain” between the West and the USSR made famous in a speech by Sir Winston Churchill at Westminster College, Missouri, in 1946, announcing the “Cold War.”

Forty-three years later, the Soviet Union unable to remain competitive with the economic West collapsed in 1989 to end the Cold War.  The Ukraine won its independence 1991, which included Crimea, and now has lost it, again, in 2014. 

McMullen writes, “While the Crimea may be an obscure corner of the world, and the Crimean War a forgotten folly of European imperialism, the nobility of these men and women, and the example they offer, are worth remembering.  Let us hope the current crisis in Crimea will be resolved without another bloody war.”  Amen to that.

Russia is inheriting the Crimean peninsula, which is sinking in debt, and corruption, something that McMullen infers Sevastopol is famous for, especially organized crime.  But on the plus side it is a warm water port for Russia.     

It would seem, at the moment that the corporate world has put away its childish ways, and is acting adult.  What saber rattling that continues is limited to rhetoric.  I have not been to Crimea, but I have been to Russia, and was delighted with the Russian people.  Granted, it was only a visit and this is a personal and subjective view of one with no expertise in Russian geopolitics. 

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What prompted me to write this missive was remembering that Jamaican chemist and his remarks on culture. 

It may seem a leap for the reader, but I remember earlier when Texas, once again, wanted to secede from the United States.  It is almost an annual affair. 

Imagine if Congress ratified that, and then subsequently a succeeding President of the United States asked for a referendum of Texas to rejoin the United States.  And imagine further that other nations of the world were ready to threaten the United States with sanctions and to boycott the buying of American products, when all Texans wanted was to be reconnected to their common heritage and common culture.  And there was a cunning crafty person who was the commander in chief of the nation, who was set on making it so.  Farfetched?     

 

JUST SAY "NO!" -- THE HARDEST WORD IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE TO SAY!

JUST SAY, “NO!”

THE HARDEST WORD IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE TO SAY

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

© March 17, 2014

Erin go bragh!

 

Standing by the spinning plastic bag rotating stile, depositing purchases made by Beautiful Betty, my wife, into our shopping cart, listening to the cashier at the checkout, as she expertly pressed the electronic key to the barcodes, then deposited the purchases in bags, sometimes double bagging them should the purchase be too heavy for a single bag, all the time talking in a nervous staccato, it jarred my memory to a time long past with a certain painful nostalgia.

This lady with an Irish lilt to her lovely voice, plump, cherubic, middle aged, a woman with tired eyes but a stalwart chin, was working at Walmart, a cashier, a job she desperately needed, and was not afraid to admit it.  But that was not where the sorrow came in for me.  It was the content of her conversation.

She was telling my wife, "My son and his girlfriend moved into my apartment, a tiny one-bedroom place, and I'm beside myself on what to do.  They asked me if they could, how could I not say 'yes'."  She looked to my wife for support, but was met only by wrapped attention. 

“We got our bonus check for the year.  Mine was for $114.  It is usually $200 or more.  I had to use it all for groceries to feed my clan, what else could I do?  They have to eat.”  Her clan was the son and girlfriend.

"My son doesn’t have a job."  She pushed her hair back, as if to rid herself of the possibility of the girlfriend getting pregnant, then what?  She glanced at me perhaps thinking I was reading her mind.  I turned away.  "My place is not big enough for me much less company."   

All the time, she never loses the rhythm of her barcode clicking, or filling the bags, rotating the stile or her place in the story.

“It is my own fault.  I could have said, ‘no,’ now couldn’t I?," she asked rhetorically, and then dashed on.  "There is no way I can make my bills and afford to feed them.  I have no place for me, no privacy, no chance to unwind at day’s end, now do I?” 

At this point, I had to walk away, and BB got out her credit card to pay.  I couldn’t even mention how angry I felt as I wheeled the steel cart out to the car.  How many relatives I have had that were like this good woman, how many of my cousins and friends were sandwiched into houses and households where they didn't belong, with their parents and their parents’ parents?

How often this was an Irish ritual that became so common no one talked about it, or much less thought about it.

The first five-years of my life I knew of such a ritual personally, and have hated it all these many years later, a ritual when my whole family as I knew it was only my little sister, Patsy Ann. 

We would be with relatives or a foster parent  -- I remember an Aunt Sadie -- or other people who weren't our aunts or uncles or relative at all.  Then, we were split up and I went to my grand Aunt Annie and Uncle Martin, lovely people, but they had offspring of their own children, some seven staying with them as well. 

I never heard my Aunt Annie or Uncle Mart complain, but it made an indelible mark on my psyche.  I swore as a little boy that this would never happen to me, and it never has, although many times it could have.

Columnist David Brooks of the New York Times is a writer of whom I’ve become quite fond of over the years.  His beat is mainly politics, which is not a great interest of mine, although I am Irish and he is Jewish.  But that said I like the scope of his mind, which in recent years has varied off his day job to becoming increasingly interested in “going deep into the self,” territory which is much more familiar to me and natural to my inclination.  I think pain does that to one.  My wonder is if it has any connection to his memory of his own youth.

In any case, in a recent column he writes about the conscious and unconscious layers to our personality and make up.  Should he read one of my works, which I doubt that he has, he would see that the deep self is estranged territory to most of us, as we don’t allow our minds to have the conversation with ourselves that I have had over the years with myself, and now most recently with myself over this checkout clerk at Walmart.  And why is that so strange to admit?

We are heaped in the rational, the cognitive and the linear, in the quantitative grab bag of popular culture, in that which is approved by society at large. 

We are mainly instinctive animals operating at an evolutionary level with that “outer layer” (in Brooks’ words), instead of paying much attention to that buried “inner layer” of the unconscious.  Most of the drivers that control our behavior reside in the "inner layer."  This finds most of us self-estranged operating 24/7 on the "outer layer," or mainly on automatic pilot.  This was the case with this matronly and well-meaning checkout clerk at Walmart. 

Theologian Paul Tillich would have a slightly different take on this than I do, but only slightly.  He would say this women cannot say “no” to her son because she, as much as she thinks she has suffered and is suffering, has not suffered enough to know herself. 

He would claim that if she had suffered enough she would realize that if her son became contemptuous of her for saying “no,” she would have no problem with it.  On the other hand, if her friends and family were equally contemptuous of her, and this caused her great distress, then it would be because what they think and feel about her is more important to her than what she thinks and feels about herself. 

Tillich and I agree that only when people have moments of intense suffering, and I’m talking about mental or psychological suffering, not physical suffering, then and only then do they finally discover that they are not the person they think they are.  It is then that the masks melt away and they experience the comfort of being one with themselves, alone, self-accepting and self-aware, and have no trouble whatsoever saying “no.”

Should you think this is a hypothetical idea, you only have to ask my own children, who are now in their mature years, to find out that I have a legendary reputation for saying “no.”  I would like to impart this ability on to this nice lady, but each of us has to find this out for ourselves on our own and by ourselves, and of course, most of us never do, and so we have the pampered society of the Justin Biebers of the world that we have.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF NOBODY EVER FOUND OUT?

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

© March 15, 2014



There is so much we do that nobody ever knows about.  It is the engine of enterprise that pulsates through most of us, and is essential if a society is to survive. 

Yet, our society is obsessed with recognition, with getting credit, with winning awards of achievement and outstanding performance.  But that is not what keeps society on an even keel, not what keeps a modicum of sanity carrying us through the day.

 
Most of us live quiet lives well below the radar, lives that represent the engine of enterprise and without which society would not exist, or could not persist. 

It is these quiet lives that sustain a community, a country, a society.  It is the lives of people of all shapes and sizes, occupations and preoccupations, joys and sorrows who keep pretty much to themselves, people who are largely invisible to the movers and shakers who get all the attention, recognition and most of the credit, while people of the earth with a center and a compass that is generally reliable pay little attention to these movers and shakers, as they are too busy being and doing.  

 
Recently, an Iowa farmer, close to ninety years old, died, and everyone wondered who he would leave his modest farm and holdings to.  Well, it turned out his holdings weren't so modest, and his farm wasn't limited to the place surrounding his bachelor home, but expanded out into the county, and into other counties.  

 

This farmer had farm land worth more than $2 million, and yet he lived almost as if he were on subsistence.  A church goer all his life, he left his $2 million estate to a number of Catholic churches spread out in several counties, churches he had visited in his long life, leaving dollar bequests ranging from $300,000 and more.

 

It was never necessary that he be found out; never necessary to proselytize.  So, I ask the question: what would you do if nobody ever found out? 

 

It was never necessary that this Iowa farmer be found out; never necessary that he demonstrate or proselytize his faith or reveal his ultimate intentions.  He was a man of the land, the land of his birth, the land that he nurtured in nature, and quietly prospered for the effort.

One can only speculate as to how the material side of his nature envisioned making a spiritual investment as a codicil to his existence.  For once his will was revealed, he was found out.  I choose to see in him faith and farming as love made visible in work, taking comfort in the words of Indian mystic Julal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273) who reminds us:

“Every one has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put into his heart.”

Indian master Swami Brahmannda (1863-1922) adds:

“If you wish to work properly, you should never lose sight of two great principles: first, a profound respect for the work undertaken; and second, a complete indifference to its fruits.  Thus only can you work with the proper attitude.” 

Chances are this farmer never read these Indian masters, but his life and work were expressions of his love of the land, and the work it provided as an expression of his joy.  Perhaps he thought he had only borrowed the land for a while and was returning it to God. 

Not a living soul had any idea that he had a “grand strategy” to make life a little better for those less fortunate in these several parishes.  These parish priests confessed he never showed his hand in life; some didn’t even know who he was.

My intention is not to single him out for praise or celebration.  He is mentioned in the context of the majority of living and working souls in every community across this tiny globe who have had or are having life experiences similar to this Iowa farmer, and feel no need that anyone knows how exquisite the pleasure they are having in the shadow of these stormy times.

  

THE FAIRNESS ISSUE -- LIFE IS WHAT WE MAKE OF IT, NOT WHAT OTHERS MAKE FOR US!

 

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

© March 14, 2014

 

REFERENCE:

Those that are regular visitors to this blog know that it covers a multitude of subjects which are expressed in common language, language easily translated into the reader’s first language by referring to the indicator on the left of the subject.  Many have discovered this blog over recent months as activity has increased from a few hundred to nearly 10,000 a month now.  Thank you.  We hope you find the information useful.

Currently, I am proofreading a work of mine going into second edition, Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches.  First published nearly a quarter century ago, it remains relevant because this transitional and transformational period in our global society has not only been a challenging one, but has found inordinate resistance to accept the fact that this is happening. 

While technology is swimmingly engulfing us with little apparent resistance, our cultures and institutions, indeed, our places of employment hold desperately on to tradition and power.  So it has been since the beginning of time.

The little excerpt that follows is taken from the pages of Work Without Managers as it first appeared.

 

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Fairness is an interesting issue, largely because there is no such thing. Whether we are winners or victors, losers or victims is, to a considerable degree, a function of how we see ourselves. Not how others see us, but how we see ourselves. Workers who are obsessed with finding fairness, consistently find instead, the lack of it. What they fail to see is that they allow unfairness to happen… not always, of course, but most of the time. It’s the true ‘bad break,’ however that they cling to— labeling it unfairness.

When destiny is tied to someone else’s rainbow, life is forever a disappointment.

Peter Drucker is emphatic: “To predict the future, one must create it.”

William Jennings Bryan adds, “Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.”

In that same connection, Percy Shelley adds, “As to us — we are uncertain people, who are chased by the spirits of our destiny from purpose to purpose, like clouds by the wind.”

And, finally, Robert Louis Stevenson submits, “Wherever we are, it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else, and whatever we do, however we do it, it is only a preparation to do something else that shall be different.” 

Incidentally, the Fairness Issue is generally viewed in terms of deprivation, rather than excess. Yet how often we read of the children of celebrities who fail to cope with the excess of privilege… from Dianne Barrymore (Too Much Too Soon, 1961) to Lindsay Crosby (Parade Magazine, February 25, 1990). Death comes to them at an early age because of alcohol, depression, debauchery, and failure as men and women. Once the support system of family is removed, they see themselves as worthless because they cannot face the future without money… and so they either slowly commit suicide by drugs and drink, or more quickly with the gun.

Read the biographies of Drucker, Bryan, Shelley, and Stevenson, and you will learn that adversity was their constant companion. And like a mad bull, they rode it to achievement.

Life and work were not always fair, but their focus was on making the most of their respective situations; of taking charge of their respective destinies; of looking for opportunity, rather than justifying complaint; of making things happen, rather than waiting for them to occur. We do not find steel in our spine by filling it with Teflon.

Yet, having said this, Human Resources has been successful in making the Fairness Issue a predominant factor of work for the majority and the minority; for professionals and skilled tradespersons; for men and women alike. As such a dominant issue, fairness confirms the thesis of worker counter dependence on the organization. Thus, the organization’s debility is a function of the dependence of the workers. Rather than taking control of their destiny, many workers suffer from a sense of being controlled —and therefore subjected to the will and caprice of management.

Rather than sensing their own empowerment, they find solace in comforting each other by whining about how unfairly they are being treated. They take consolation in playing the ‘victim of the system,’ which insulates and isolates them from the Culture of Contribution.

Lost in this preoccupation with fairness is recognition of worker power. In the Information Age — where knowledge holds most of the trump cards in this game of Bridge that links the past with the future — workers hold a finesse hand, while continuing to play the dummy. It would be comedic if it weren’t so tragic.

It is an endless battle of control, with those exercising control (management) not having it; and those having control (workers) not exercising it; with productive work falling between them. In praise of fairness, it is reduced to a praise of folly. Who orchestrates this scenario? Human Resources.

To be fair, an oblique explanation of this development can be traced to the rise of college educated blue-collar workers.  Many of these college graduates went into the “helping professions,” which included Human Resources.  These first and second generation professionals came from families used to taking orders, not giving them; to maintaining the agenda of management, not contributing to its design; being influenced by management, not influencing it; following, not leading. 

As a consequence, Human Resources unwittingly became management’s union instead of workers’ advocate, selectively creating cosmetic changes that were no threat to either management’s power or its control. 

PERHAPS THERE IS A LITTLE NOSTRADAMUS IN ALL OF US!

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

© March 12, 2014

Everyone is familiar with the name Nostradamus if not the actual man.  He did exist and lived nearly to the age of 63 years, which was a long life for his time (1503-1566).  He was trained as an apothecary, a pharmacist in our parlance, but is best remembered for his book Les Prophesies (1555).  This book is known worldwide, a book that has hardly ever been out of print in nearly 500 years.

We are fascinated by prophecies or predictions, but curiously, mainly about those that don’t directly impact on our lives, say events in history, or calamitous happenings in the near or distant past. 

Academics are not inclined to find Nostradamus Quatrains credible.  Instead, they suspect Nostradamus has been misinterpreted, mistranslated or fraudulently exploited. Whatever the case may be, this has failed to dim the Frenchman's prognosticating appeal or the hypnotic enchantment of his predictions. 

Most of his prophecies deal with natural events such as plagues, earthquakes and floods, but also human events such as wars, invasions and battles.  Napoleon and Hitler, among many others, are selectively extrapolated from these lines as if they appear definitively, which they don't.

Nostradamus must have been an interesting man, even a complex one, as he drifted from science into the occult, dabbling in astrology and parapsychology, then back again into science updating the works of the Greek physician Galen (AD 129 – 200) to match his own work as a healer. 

The fact that he is still read in the 21^st century by people of all persuasions, as he has been read in the past, suggest a constant if not compelling interest in the divine as well as the occult in contrast to the scientific dominance of our current times.  Don't expect many to come out of the closet and admit this to being so.  Nostradamus is an acquired taste best kept to oneself.

But I wander.  What caused me to reflect on Nostradamus was how fascinated we are with predictions against how unreliable predictions generally are.  People are always predicting disasters.  But like "Chicken Little" of the nursery rhyme most of us don't pay attention to them until after the sky has fallen, and we are embarrassed with the consequences of our inaction.

Many in the financial community, among them Meredith Whitney, predicted the domino effect of Citigroup and others falling, leading to the 2008 financial crash that became a cataclysmic financial event.  How the movers and shakers scampered about as if chickens with their heads off in that October of 2008.  The second Great Depression was in the air, and they were as they say "late to the party."  If gives one pause how tenuous the connection between those that know and those that don't, and the rest of us.   

The economic boom of the new century was on, and to think it couldn't continue was nonsense, all indicators were up, that is, if not examined closely.  Meredith Whitney did, a person who was better known for her marriage to the famous wrestler, John Layfield.  It just goes to show you.


Perhaps there was a little Nostradamus in her.  We choose to ignore such people as we are robotically and hypnotically encased in the nether land of the Great Tomorrows and Never Ending Yesterdays.

I've had something of a Nostradamus experience.  Perhaps you have had one as well.

Mine was based upon my work with repeated themes cascading my conscious mind with such frequency that I couldn't ignore them.  Perhaps that was the case with the lady of finance who predicted the Wall Street crash.

The Nostradamus theme returned to mind as I am currently in the process of editing my 1991 book, Work Without Managers: A View From The Trenches, to be rereleased as a 2nd Edition by TATE Publishing Company.

Serendipitously, I have been reading column after column in newspapers and on the Internet, study after study from think tanks and research foundations, report after report from consultants that proclaim, as if freshly discovered, concepts and themes that graced the pages of this original work a quarter century ago, concepts and themes, I might add, which were largely ignored.   

For example, consultant Judith Herbage in “The Changing Nature of Organization, Work and Workplace” (2014) seems an echo of repeated themes in WWMs (1991).  The same is true of the Pew Research Survey (February 14-23, 2014), and today a column by David Brooks in the New York Times (March 12, 2014).

The difference with these sources and WWMs is that the foundation of that book was empirical and subjective, data derived from the author’s national and international work on four continents over a period of forty year.  Trained to discern patterns and processes, chronic problems and perturbations, the book, which was published by the author's own firm, was an attempt to present the obvious.  Self-interests, of course, always blinds one from perceiving the obvious.  Have no doubt, this was a frontal attack on the irrelevancy of management in the changing dynamic of work, workers and the workplace.  I, as author, was metaphorically biting the hand that fed me.

Some of the themes in WWMs a quarter century ago now getting consideration today are:

(    Hierarchical management is anachronistic and managers are atavistic.

(    The management tree could be cut by 50 percent and it would double productivity.

    
     Workers are now professionals and no longer respond to the demands and dictates of oligarchical management dependence, although they still remain counter dependent on the corporation for their total well being.
 

(    Not programmed to be self-reliant workers retreat into passive behaviors that cripple organizations.

(
5    Professional don’t trust the system.

(    
6    Professionals are not loyal to the system.

    
(     Professionals don’t believe in the system.

(
      Professional are not motivated by management or the system.

(    
      Professionals are not patriotic and find nothing in common with the common good.

(
1    Professionals have adopted what I call personhood.

The corporate structure has unwittingly promoted learned helplessness resulting in most workers isolated in terminal adolescence reactive and passive waiting to be rescued.

Professionals are critical of the system failing to recognized they are the system.


WWMs was not the first to believe there is more with less, but personhood is an expression coined which has not yet become part of our language.

Millennials, which is a word not envisioned coming into our vocabulary -- we love to identify generations as "X" and "Y" and "ME" -- does not diminish the fact that WWMs was prescient in that it captured the essence of this newest generation whatever its monocle. 

Millennials are part of the Fisher Paradigm©™ and for that reason I think perhaps we all have a little Nostradamus in us.    

LISTEN PEOPLE! YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN! CONTRACT WORKERS ANONYMOUS!

LISTEN PEOPLE!

YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN!

CONTRACT WORKERS ANONYMOUS!

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

Copyright March 11, 2014

 

There is something about investing four to six years in post high school education at some college or university, leaving formal matriculation with sheepskin in hand, and student loans that will haunt you for many years to come to put the mind in a safe place where no thinking is allowed, at least thinking that disturbs the tranquility of your spirit, at least for the moment.

People!  It isn’t like it was five years ago, ten years ago, or beyond.  Nothing is as it was; nothing is as it seems, or how we would like it to be.  Millennials get it, but I doubt most professionals do.

The ugly head of capitalism no longer simply causes high school dropouts to cower.  It moves well up the food chain to do the same to those who think, degree in hand, that they are ordained to experience that richer diet; that they belong; that they are exceptional; that the warm sun of good fortune was meant to shine on them no matter how stormy the weather forecasts.  Optimism is such a fatal disease.

These college graduates with the ink barely dry on their diplomas have been too busy to pay attention to what has happened to their blue collar fathers and mothers, uncles and aunts, and family friends; too busy to see Shylock taking a pound of flesh from them, and of course the pound taken controls their hearts and therefore their passions and livelihood.

Something is wrong with this picture, and it has been wrong for a long, long time.  Ordinary people, what Kierkegaard called “common man,” have been asleep at the switch praying things would get better of their own accord; that they had to do nothing but believe, be patient, trust the system, and the economic "Ship of State" would get back on an even keel, and everything would be milk and honey again.  The audacity of hope became surrogate for bread on the table. 

People escaped into virtual reality games, as if words and pictures and pixels could provide biological nutrition.  Entertainments became substitutes for life, for love, for experience, for living for the future.

Few have noted what has been happening, fewer still have taken action. 

Yesterday, a star NFL football player, 26, quit the game, saying the game he learned to play and love since a little boy had changed into a sideshow, a soap opera, where athletes had to be on all the time as if on stage, had to satisfy the voracious appetite of fans for interviews, comments, and cavalier invasion into their private lives, as if the fans owned them, and they were slaves to fans’ demands. 

Indeed, fans could tweet and tweet and tweet some more to criticize these NFL players’ every act and excoriate them at well, and they were expected to take it with a smile.  Fans wanted them to behave, this young man believes, as if they were pixels in those virtual reality football games and therefore could be manipulated at will.  In fact, the virtual reality of the NFL is now more popular than cleats on the turf.

This is the affluent end of the chain of enslavement where players of the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB and NASCAR have to pay in humiliation and personal invasion for earning the big dollars, as these fans believe they share ownership of them with the team owners, which to my mind is the newest form of slavery.

The irony is that we have made billionaires of some of the millennials who have had the foresight to take advantage of this inclination.  We see this in the billions of Facebook aficionados, and other social networking configurations. 

Those proclaiming the humanity of this new technology have somehow misplaced the idea that the happiest people are not available for public consumption. 

There is no reason to fault Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk.  People like him study trends and appetites and exploit them.  Seventy years ago Hugh Hefner did that with his psychosexual Playboy fantasy, and left his indelible scar on society ever since.

It is our weaknesses, not our strengths that lead to these colossal successes, successes that ultimately define generations.

This brings me back to my original premise, the surreal nature of employment today, the reality of which is not too far different in its impact than that experienced by working stiffs in factories of fifty, sixty or seventy years ago, when ordinary working men and women were part of a prideful and proud working middle class, a force so energetic, nimble and perspicacious that it won World War Two, when the nation was sound asleep as Pearl Harbor was being bombed by the Imperial Navy and Air Force of Japan on December 7, 1941, a date that I doubt many under the age of fifty have any idea of its significance.  

They tell me that as many as 50 percent of our college graduates since 2000 are working in jobs below their skill level, working part time, working as contractors, not working in their fields if working at all. 

The world of full-time employment, lifetime employment, generous benefit packages, including opportunities for additional educational training at the company’s expense are becoming increasingly rare and disappearing fast.

This has become the fate of a work force programmed in comfort and complacency.  Quietly and unobtrusively, comfort and complacency have become an industrial and commercial norms, justifying companies to outsource work to well-trained people, people desperate to work, people who have been looking for work for months if not years, people who will accept a paycheck without benefits or guarantees because they believe they have no choice.

Years ago, I wrote in one of my books (Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, 1991) about the 20, 40, 60 unwritten rule for this one company. 

Human resources was to examine closely the employment records of people who had been twenty years with the company, were over forty-years-of-age and were making $60,000 or more, for possible furloughing, made redundant or fired based upon suspect work records.  Human resources was then to look for replacements with people who were young, qualified to do the same work, and could be paid at the entry level, or ideally, outsourced as contract workers without insurance, vacation, or other benefits. 

Exposure of this practice got the CEO fired, resulted in a sharp decline in business with the company no longer an industrial leader.  These many years later the company is still in business, but has never regained its former status.

Who would have thought that such a policy would become common as it has today, only the salary level for HR review has usually been bumped up to $120,000? 

The “New Millennials,” people in their early twenties, people with at least some college to one college degree, professionals, as I call them, are cynical as a group, distrustful of the system, distrustful of capitalism, and flying with a whole new set of values that I suspect doesn’t jive too well with their grandparents. 

Millennials are not religious, not patriotic, and not optimistic that things are going to get much better.  They are not even too concerned about climate change or global warming, or whatever is the current attack theme of environmentalists.  The only thing they seem positive about as a group is gay rights.

It would be encouraging to me if they were equally passionate about worker rights, and worker authority, and workers as stirrers of the economic drink.  But alas, it appears that millennials are willing to take it on the chin the same as blue-collar workers were, and professionals are in the persons of their parents and older brothers and sisters.  This is not encouraging.

Millennials are cynical about the whole idea of work, something that has made America what it is.  Over my long lifetime, coming from the working class, work has been the symphony that we all shared together, orchestrated as farmers, laborers, craftsmen, teachers, coaches or knowledge workers.  

We assumed things would continue as they were.  That is our fault as it has become our fault line.  We didn’t pay attention to the collapse of the economic infrastructure (re: 2008 Wall Street "meltdown"), or do anything about it when it occurred if it didn't touch us directly. 

We ignored the skyrocketing incomes of CEOs.  We didn’t take seriously that management, a class that was invented in the twentieth century as if it had always existed took most of the coin and credit for what we did. 

To be fair, management took the blame for what we didn’t do because managers had the mistaken idea that they were owners and not employees like the rest of us.  They took that hubris to the bank, and we allowed it to be so.  We also allowed management to play these 20-40-60 games with our lives, as if they had the right. 

We have seen management’s obsession with keeping the peace with stakeholders and stockholders, putting the best face on its watch, many times forgetting the company’s mission, which too often found such managed companies vulnerable to hostile takeovers, where arbitrageurs and merger and acquisition high flyers made billions playing funny with our jobs and our money, while we in the trenches lost our jobs, and watched our communities dry up, sometimes resembling ghost towns in the aftermath.

Millennials don’t use the concept of the “personhood” as opposed to the common good to explain themselves.  Indeed, they are not interested in explaining themselves at all.  These are just words to them.  They know they are on their own, which is wise in one sense, but at the expense of their spiritual counterbalancing good will.  They are not angry.  They don’t even plan to get even. 

Millennials simply know they are likely to be contract workers all their lives if they don’t create their own little village.  They are our future and they don’t plan to look back or apologize for only looking ahead.  Older professionals would do well to study them.  Older professionals have been coasting, and now coasting is nothing but staying in place, or falling into a sinkhole.