ARE WE ALREADY BEING PUNISHED IN ABSTENTIA? A WRITER COMMENTS ON "END OF SINCERITY?"

ARE WE ALREADY BEING PUNISHED IN ABSTENTIA?

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

© May 1, 2014

REFERENCE:

This is with reference to: “End of Sincerity?  Is the Constitution of the NBA to trump the Constitution of the United States?”

Many have written saddened by the despicable and racial comments of the L A Clippers’ owner, Donald Sterling, of that NBA franchise, but they wonder at its constitutional implications.  Undoubtedly, African Americans, NBA fans or not, feel for once that they have attained a modicum of social justice, but the question remains, at what price? 

A READER WRITES:

Hi Jim,

Haven't responded to one of your missives in a while. I do read them and occasionally disagree with what you say, but I've been busy rehabbing and flipping houses as, due to age, I am no longer welcome in my chosen profession. I surmise 55 is the new 75 in manufacturing.

When I was earning an MBA (a degree you have panned many times) one of the required courses was business ethics.

Father McMahon stood at the front of the class with his pointer reviewing a list of business practices important to a budding manager. Some were well understood.

We don't vote on who leads us nor on their decisions.

One person assembles input from subordinates and data from Finance, mulls it over, then issues a decision.

We cannot remark on another's appearance lest it be considered sexually discomforting.

During a union campaign, or contract vote we cannot threaten or promise to sway the vote.

We can't even listen in on employee conversations.

Typically, we are not allowed to express our religious views or openly pray because another might find it offensive.

We can be hired or fired at will, just because they didn't like something, not work-related, that you did.

Maybe you drank too much at the Christmas party. Oops, Holiday party.

There were more things on the list. As he finished, Fr. McMahon turned to the class and said, "So, what does this mean?" I raised my hand. He pointed to me. I said, "When you pass through the company's front door, the Constitution is suspended."

Fr. McMahon threw down his pointer and said, "I just spent fifteen minutes to say what you just said in a few words. Class dismissed."

The Constitution is a wonderful document. The framers were wise men who could not have anticipated manufacturers would be able to make enough guns so every man, woman and child in America could carry one and have another at home; that an Internet would develop to spew hate messages from any bigot with a modicum of keyboard skill and, to a lesser extent, various types of pornography; that, through interpretations of a Supreme Court, our democracy would evolve into an oligarchy where rich corporations, through lobbyists and campaign contributions, control most of the laws issued by Congress.

We are already being punished in abstentia because fifty percent or more of us are absent on Election Day. We get the Constitutional interpretation we deserve.

Michael

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Michael,

First of all, I don't write to persuade readers to my point of view, but to get them in touch with their own.  I see myself as an enabler and facilitator not as a promulgator of “universal truth.” It is my point of view.

A boyhood friend of mine, Robert McMahon, became a priest.  I could imagine him teaching a course in ethics, but I have no knowledge where his priesthood took him.

Father McMahon's comment that you got there in one sentence that took him a whole lecture made me smile.  A good friend reminded me recently that I use "100 times as many words" as he does to say something to which he agrees.  My BB has accused me of the same.

Yes, I am hard on MBA's, perhaps in part because I taught as an adjunct professor for ten years for several colleges and universities in their graduate MBA programs, and often found many of them -- some with Ph.D.'s in chemistry and engineering -- who didn't know a gerund from a participle and couldn't write a simple declarative sentence, much less craft a comprehensive conceptual idea.

Many of these students not only couldn’t express themselves convincingly and therefore persuasively, but they had contempt for the whole business of self-expression, seeing it as not necessarily a primary skill, when none could be more important.

One of the reasons we are in the trouble we find ourselves today is because good minds cannot connect with a wider audience that might benefit from their wisdom.  And so the self-conscious mechanics rule the day. 

Language isn't a sun tan; not a stunning physique or figure, not what you see but what you are. 

Writers struggle, sometimes valiantly, to match what is inside with what people see on the outside. That is a personal perspective. 

In a macro sense, writing is an attempt to match what the eyes see, the heart feels, and what resonates with the soul as an expression of thought.  It is a quiet mind speaking to itself.

Once this was a thing of beauty as it was of a single cloth -- body, mind, soul -- as if touched by God in the expression of some universal truth.  But no more. 

Writing, like nearly everything else, is now self-conscious, written for affect and effect, written to an audience, written as cache to a job, career, or simply to get a B.A., B.S., M.A., M.S., Ph.D. or MBA after your surname.

If you read biographies, and I suspect you do, great writers claim they were writing only to themselves in an effort to discover the language of their heart.

I am speaking of authors before the twentieth century.  Authors such as Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald were self-conscious writers who perfected peculiar styles indigenous to their natures, creating a whole army of copiers such as Norman Mailer, John Updike, et. al. 

Writing became mechanistic, as cold and calculating and as brittle as the times.

Read Freud, perhaps one of the best writers of the twentieth century, who invented a discipline that described only his own neuroses if not psychoses, and the world accepted his self-consciousness as its own.  He couldn't have done it if he hadn't had the genius of expression for what he thought.

Freud understood that despite what we might think we are all pretty much the same, as we operate with the same limited equipment.  He reminded people of this and captured their anxieties; other self-conscious authors helped us forget these limitations, and we rewarded them with celebrity. 

The world of ideas, and the expression of them today is not a pretty place. 

My effort, which is sometimes alluded to as that of a provocateur, is to get people to get in touch with themselves, to get beyond that cold steel of the “Tin Man” to the rhythm of their warm hearts.  Not an easy chore for I -- by measure of my success as a writer -- have been a miserable failure, yet I keep trying, as that is all I know.

Thank you for getting beyond your MBA as you express yourself very well, and always have.

Be always well,

Jim