Who are you?

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

© May 31, 2014

“To thine own self be true” – with what a promise that phrase sings in our ears!

Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (1980)

In the social jungle of human existence there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity. 

Erik H. Erikson, Identity, Youth, and Crisis (1968)

In healthy people (motivation) usually is autonomous of its origins.  Its function is to animate and steer a life toward goals that are in keeping with present structure, present aspirations, and present conditions. 

Gordon W. Allport, Personality and Social Encounter (1955)

To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening.  To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest of decency.  But it is a far more difficult achievement to see ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds.

Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (1985)

This is a society in which the individual can only rarely and with difficulty understand himself and his activities as interrelated in morally meaningful ways with those of other, different Americans.

Robert Bellah, et. al., Habits of the Heart (1985)

Asked but how answered?

It would be so easy to be overwhelmed with this question.  Man throughout the ages has been asking himself this question, invariably coming up with an answer not terribly different from his predecessors.  This should not be surprising as we are all working with the same machine, our brain.  But is that true?  What of the body’s role?  We shall explore this.

What is unfortunate is that most of us have allowed someone else to consider the question of our identity and we have accepted their rationale as being our own.  This is especially true of academics and researchers who devote their lives to this question, persons who are exposed to the same vicissitudes as we are and are equally subjected to the same contradictions.  Just as you cannot separate me, the person, from what I write here the same is true of whatever you read on the question of identity. 

This is not to disparate genuine researchers into this Briar’s Patch of sticky inconsistencies when it comes to the question, but only to give proper perspective to the reader.

Marshall Berman writes of Erik Erikson, the famous psychotherapist:

His (Erikson’s) systematic constructions are arbitrary and unwieldy at best because he really has a fundamentally different cast of mind. What Erikson brought to America was not a body of German ideas by a distinctively and deeply German experience: the experience of adolescent elation and anguish and yearning. the elation and despair, the beauty and tragedy of adolescence, had rarely been confronted in American literature or culture before the 1950's, but they have been at the very heart of German imaginative life for the last two hundred years -- from Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther" and "Wilhelm Meister" to Holderlin's "Hyperion" to Mann's "Tonio Kroger" to everything by Hermann Hesse to Kafka's "The Judgment" and "Amerika."

Erikson's sensibility has always been wrapped up in the storms and stresses of adolescent crisis. But he understood (as he would later explain) that, in German literature and life alike, those crises tended to end disastrously, with youth's abject submission or self-destruction or both.

When Erikson left Europe at 31 in 1933, German youth was throwing itself into what would turn out to be the most disastrous ending of all. In America, Erikson must have hoped, adolescent visions and longings, including his own, could find far happier endings: the youthful energy and open expansiveness of American society and culture might give youth a chance to fly freely at last.

Thus, of all the thousands of men and women who crossed the Atlantic in the 1930's, Erikson was uniquely open and receptive to the promise of American life. His creative powers seem to have taken wing from the moment he arrived here, and in forty years he has not looked back. It is as if he needed to make the passage to America in order to resolve his own youthful "identity crisis" and become himself.

Erikson's path of development has led him to a remarkable personal cultural fusion: he has managed to unite the German evocation of youthful longings and despair with the typically American faith in improvement, progress and happy endings. His beautiful essay, "The Problem of Ego-Identity" (1956), argues that some of them so desperate and terrifying crises of adolescence can turn out to be ultimately creative. Thus youthful acts of leaning out over any number of precipices" may be modes of "playful experimentation" with experiences that are actually "becoming amenable to ego control." The most total forms of physical, mental and emotional paralysis may reveal -- if only we know how to "read" them -- "a wish to be born again, to learn the first steps toward reality and mutuality." The most devastating self-destruction may actually be "a radical search for the rock-bottom -- both the ultimate limit of regression and the only firm foundation for renewed progression."  (New York Times, March 30, 1975).

We process information from “experts” as self-evident and accept it without question as self-understanding. 

It is as if we think philosophers and theologians, psychiatrists and psychologists, priests and nuns, educators and pundits, gurus and mystics hold the keys to source material unavailable to us in our confusion.  It never occurs to us that they may be using us as laboratory to get through their own.

We look out of our cage for answers to our conundrum instead of in our own hearts.  The irony is that many of those we elevate to such authority status are like us, lost men looking for an audience for authentication.  Nigel Dennis writes in Cards of Identity (1984):

"On all matters of fact I am perfectly honest: I can state dates, acts of reason with absolute veracity.  But once I start confessing the why-and-wherefore of my behavior (as one is expected to do in a book), I become so entertained by the personal drama of it all that everything I put down has a wonderful ring of truth: I feel myself growing from a particular person into a universal design."

Now, before we congratulate Nigel Dennis for his disclosure, let us not be confused.  As sincere as this utterance may be, it is meant to capture the attention of the reader and to relax that reader’s suspicion that it may be self-serving, which clearly it is.

The shadow play of self-help books has a wide market and mass appeal.  As Berman points out in his piece, Erikson latched on to our American desire for self-improvement, our belief in progress and happy endings, and perceived a clear need, but a need with someone else other than ourselves having the key to bringing that state about.  We seldom wonder at the genius of those who claim to have answers for us.  So, we are disinclined to ask them to take off their masks.

Donning the Mask

Erik H. Erikson, the foremost clinical psychologist of his day on matters of identity, was not there for his daughter when she was going through a mind wrenching divorce.  She had to turn to her mother for her sanity who had no credentials at all. 

It gets even murkier.  Erikson, the identity architect, wasn’t Erikson at all, but rather Erik Homburger.  In his youth, he was as uncertain about his religion as about his parentage.  His observant Jewish family was jarred when he formally broke off relations with the rabbi at the local synagogue.  He began to study the Christian Gospels and was electrified one morning when he heard the Lord’s Prayer spoken in Luther’s German. 

Without any formal training or credentials, a Freudian group hired him on the basis of his way with children.  What is ironic is that Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud’s daughter, found him personally appealing and professionally useful.  She was happy to welcome a handsome, talented young man of Gentile appearance who was attracted to their revolutionary enterprise. 

Erikson’s genius lay in his extraordinary clinical insights, not in academia.  A clinical artist if anything, he kept journals since a young boy.  These are full of insights that reflect his troubled childhood.  With Anna Freud’s blessing, in any case, he came to America and assumed clinical positions at Harvard, Yale, and the University of California at Berkeley.  In 1939, he became an American citizen, changed his name to Erik H. Erikson and launched a most successful literary and academic career (see Lawrence J. Friedman, Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson, 1999).

Bruno Bettelheim, for more than four decades, was regarded by the public-at-large as one of the world’s most important and influential psychotherapists, a Viennese intellectual who stood as “one of Freud’s few genuine heirs of our time.” 

In fact, Bettleheim was a lumber dealer who grandly invented himself with a faked set of academic credentials after immigrating to the United States in 1939.  In the years that followed, deception followed deception as Bettleheim claimed that he had traveled in Freud’s circle, had treated autistic children in Vienna, had interviewed 1,500 fellow prisoners for his famous psychological study of concentration camp behavior, and had been freed from Buchenwald through the intervention of Eleanor Roosevelt.

A gifted writer if also fabricator, he headed the Orthogenic School for Emotionally Disturbed Children at the University of Chicago for three decades.  There he continued his fabrications, maintaining that he had treated “hundreds” of schizophrenic children who feared for their lives at the hands of their parents, shaping pseudonymous case histories to enhance his reputation, and claiming, with concocted statistics, that he was returning 85 percent of his young patients to normal lives. 

Popularly known as “Dr. B,” he often spun angrily out of control and abused the children both physically and emotionally, all the while insisting in his books and from the lectern that such punishment was absolutely verboten. 

Autism that he insisted in such books as The Uses of Enchantment (1977) could be treated successfully with psychotherapy has proven wrong as well as ill advised.  Autism has proven to have a physiological origin in the brain.

Bettleheim won the National Book Award for this book that dealt with the psychological meaning of fairy tales.  Later, parts of this work were discovered to have been plagiarized.  In 1990, he died by his own hand by asphyxiation his head covered in a plastic bag.

Biographers relate that Bruno Bettleheim was a boy who grew up in a home darkened for years by his father’s struggle with syphilis, a son who felt ugly, loathed his poor eyesight, and resented having to drop out of the University of Vienna at age twenty-three to take over the lumber business after his father died.  He was plagued with depression all his life and felt constantly the outsider, a self-hating Jew who compensated by noisily blaming the Jews of Europe for walking into the ovens of the Holocaust without a fight (see Richard Pollak, The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettleheim, 1997).

Werner Hans Erhard, the founder of est (Erhard Seminar Training), the most popular guru style system of self-discovery of the 1970s, left a wife and four children and his original name, John Paul Rosenburg in Ohio, slipped off to California, created a new identity and persona.  He advertised himself as a critical thinker with transformational models for people to rebuild their lives.   He and est became the rage of Hollywood’s tinsel town set, which in turn spread across the United States and Western Europe. 

Erhard created a mix bag of disciplines, consciousness techniques, religions, and systems to wow his devotees.  His story is an American soap opera of American will and Oriental intellect journeying inward in a smorgasbord of half-baked intellectual appetizers.   It is also the story of a rogue genius who struggled mightily for self-mastery and fulfillment, making his devotees feel that their struggle matched his own (see W. W. Bartley, III, Werner Erhard: The Transformation of a Man, 1978).

Identity and authenticity at root spring from the loneliness and anxiety our secular society has produced.   It was comforting when there was God to turn to because turning to God was, in fact, turning to one’s inner self for peace, solace, renewal and hope.  The men profiled here are essentially God’s replacements in the modern world.  If it were not them, it would be others.  They came into being because we willed it to be so.  They took on a role and responsibility that we gladly gave them because it meant that we didn’t have to assume that role ourselves.  We are always at the ready for palliatives packaged to meet our insatiable need for reassurance.  Like hyenas out in the bushveld, looking for an easy meal another predator has killed, we have entrepreneurs. 

Living in Ibsen’s Doll House

Several observers in the nineteenth century saw this coming, this splitting up of the personality as the Industrial Revolution fragmented society with the individual collateral damage.  Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote about it, French painter Paul Cézanne captured it in art, and Austrian psychoanalyst Freud developed a nomenclature for human nature and called it science. 

Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House (1879) shows a husband who keeps his work and family in separate compartments, and treats his wife as a doll in a house that is empty of love, caring and intimacy, and therefore cannot but collapse.  Cézanne treats art in realistic rather than nineteenth century sentimental terms, believing beauty has more to do with integrity than prettiness.  Freud points out that people repress emotions and try to act as if sex and anger do not exist, and consequently end up as neurotics.

Friedrich Nietzsche is best known for saying “God is dead!”  What he actually proclaimed in the late nineteenth century was that society was becoming a factory.  He feared, and as history has shown rightly so, that man’s great advances in techniques would unlikely generate parallel advances in ethics and self-understanding.  He saw this would all lead to nihilism and the “death of God.” 

It is a haunting story of a madman who runs into the village square shouting, “Where is God?”  The people around did not believe in God.  They laughed and said perhaps God had gone on holiday.  The madman then shouted: “Whither is God?  I shall tell you!  We have killed him, you and I!”

Nietzsche is not calling for a return to the conventional belief in God, but is pointing out what happens when a society loses its center of values, its compass, alas, its guidance system.  This loss, this fragmentation and separation has gravitated to the loss of the sense of self, and the reason for the question: Who are you?”

A variation of this dilemma, and continuation of Ibsen’s “doll house” theme is presented in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1976).  Willie Loman is portrayed as a man very much like the rest of us common people – neither alcoholics nor psychotics – who make up the social situation in this country out of which most of us have sprung. 

Willie Loman was a man who took seriously the programming of his society, that success should attend hard, energetic work, that economic progress is a reality and that if one has the right “contacts,” achievement and salvation should inevitably follow. 

The one thing that matters with Willie is that he believes.  He takes seriously his own existence and what he had been taught he could rightly expect from life.  “I don’t say he is a great man,” says his wife in describing Willie’s disintegration to their sons, “but he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him.  So attention must be paid.” 

The tragic fact is not that Willie is a man of the grandeur of King Lear or the inward richness of Hamlet.  “He’s only a little boat looking for a harbor,” his wife says.

But the tragedy is historic if you multiply Willie by the tens of millions of fathers and brothers who believe what they are taught only to find in the changing of times that it does not work, that society is a “doll house” empty of promise, a place separate from the reality of experience, compartmentalized in increasingly intricate fashion so that the original ideas upon which it was all built seem to be a mirage.  It is betrayal of the most egregious kind, but no one knows who the betrayer is. 

“He never knew who he was,” his wife concludes, “and he took seriously his right to know.”

The flaw in the tragic character, Arthur Miller writes, is really nothing but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status.  Only the passive, only those who accept their lot without active retaliation, are flawless.  Most of us to some degree are in that category.

Miller goes on to say the quality that shakes us derives from the underlying fear of being displaced, torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in the world. 

Far from being a pessimist, the tragic view Miller asserts, indicates we take seriously our freedom and need to realize ourselves.  It is significant there is little sense of tragedy today.  In our age of emptiness, tragedies are relatively rare as playwrights are more concerned with sexology than psychology.  There is no Oedipus, Agamemnon, or Orestes; no Othello, Lear, Hamlet or Macbeth, only the personification of screaming hormones.

Search for Identity

In achieving personal identity, most of us must start back at the beginning and rediscover our feelings.  The tendency, when looking back, often is one of self-pity blaming parents, peers, circumstances, teachers, preachers, coaches, or partners for our lot in life.  Even then the inventions are often wide of the mark as Freud shows in his many studies.

There may be precedence in our histories of physical, psychological or sexual abuse, as these do occur, but the mind is imperfect.  My middle aged daughter was recently retelling me of a favorite vacation of her childhood, and in the retelling involved the juxtaposing of times, places and happenings, which were incongruous with that one event that she was remembering seemingly so vividly.  This happens.  

Likewise, it is surprising how many of us have only a general sense of what we feel.  We say I feel “fine” or “lousy” or “okay,” as if we have no actual idea.  It is just a mechanical response.  Our connection with what we feel is as remote as Ibsen’s “doll house” is to familiarity.  In T.S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men,” we experience ourselves as

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralyzed force, gesture without motion.

For many of us, it is hard work to feel.  We have little intuitive sense of who we are, where we are or what we are because of this sensory deprivation.  However, if we would “listen to the body,” we would know when to work, when to rest, when and with whom to engage in relationships, and with whom not to trust or go near.  We would also feel what situations create the premonition of danger and the ones that give us a sense of safety. 

The body knows and is ever alert if we would but listen to it.  So, the first step is to welcome the body back into union with the self.  It means experiencing the body from the pleasure of eating and resting to a sense of when to withdraw and regroup, indeed, when to call “a time out!”    

Awareness of one’s feelings lays the groundwork for the second step: knowing what you need and want.  Again, most people cannot identify needs or separate them from wants.  Life can so easily fall into the cage of routine. 

You need a job to provide for yourself and family, but what do you want?  A career?  A college education?  The luxury and freedom to be able to write a book?  What?  The adolescent disposition, which can grab hold of a person in his youth and hold on for a lifetime, represents a failure to understand and realize the difference. 

An obsessive-compulsive person, or even a person who is primarily of an impulsive nature, is unlikely to have a firm grasp of his feelings.  Feelings are his master rather he is theirs.  

A popular limerick of Freud’s fits this dilemma:  The ego has no lid and the id.  Stated another way, reason has no control over our impulsive nature.  In transactional analytical (T/A) terms, it would suggest the child has control over the adult and there is no parent around (see Eric Berne, Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, 1964, and John M. Dusay, Egograms: How I See You and You See Me, 1977).

The third step in this process of rediscovering our feelings and their relationship to our needs and wants is to recover our relations with the subconscious.  This has been deemed an alien force in modern man.  We are programmed to think, not feel; to be objective, not subjective; to be “value free” in our observations, not conscious of the unconscious side of our personality. 

Consequently, most of us are skin-deep personalities.  We suppress the irrational as if it does not exist to insist on being fully conscious of ourselves as rational beings in a rational ordering society where there is a place for everything and everything knows its place.  

You only have to look around you at the chaos of contemporary life to see how absurd and counterproductive this is.  It is one of the reasons we have been attracted to Eastern thought, and why people such as Werner Erhard hit upon transformational models for est.  Eastern religions, including Buddhism, Shintoism, and the ethics of Confucius, leave room for dreams, myths, fairy tales, and unhurried insights:

There is no place to seek the mind; 

It is like the footprints of the birds in the sky.

Above, not a piece of tile to cover the head;

Beneath, not an inch of earth to put one’s foot on.

Sitting quietly, doing nothing,

Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.

The water before, and the water after,

Now and forever flowing, follow each other.

One word determines the whole world;

One sword pacifies heaven and earth.

If you do not get it from yourself,

Where will you go for it?

(Robert Sohl, Audrey Carr, The Gospel According to Zen, 1970)

We look for authorities to interpret our life so we will understand its meaning.  Erich Fromm insists in The Forgotten Language (1957) that no such expertise is needed, that we are part of a universal language shared by all mankind.  It is the language of the subconscious that we have forgotten, but have the ability to relearn if so moved. 

But to do this we must get beyond our passive state, the part of us that allows the deterministic forces in experience to take the place of self-awareness.  Equally damaging is activism, the part of us that uses activity to substitute for awareness. 

Aliveness often means the capacity not to act, but to be creatively idle.  This is more difficult than to do something.  Doing something wins approval in our times, while doing nothing raises eyebrows.  Robert Louis Stevenson puts it this way, “To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.”  Self-awareness brings into focus a quiet kind of aliveness where contemplation and meditation and prayer bring a new appreciation of being something rather than merely doing something.

Who are you?

It is hoped that this discussion proves helpful.  That said obviously no one else can drive you to your destiny than you.  It is a solitary journey and made more difficult with the loss of a center of values along with a reliable moral compass.  You can ask yourself some questions that might prove useful:

Did you throw away your career as a musician because accounting was more practical?

Do you pay close attention to fashion trends to see what you should wear?

Are you obsessed with being “in”?

How important are other people’s opinions to you?  More than your own?

Do you follow celebrity activities more than you pay attention to yours?

Do you have a true, trusted, loyal friend?  Is it you?  If not, why not?

Are you caught up in other people’s lives and worried about what is best for them?

Are you lonely when alone?

Are you anxious when there is no distracting noise?

Are you uncomfortable in your own skin?

Many of us need to get in touch with who we are and not what our parents, teachers, preachers, friends and bosses tell us we are, or worse yet, how they tell us we should be. 

We grow from the outside in, not the inside out, subject to all these influences in our impressionistic years.  A time arrives when we must set our own agenda, when we need to find a way to accept who we are and where we are, and to understand how we got there rather than somewhere else. 

If we can manage that, if we can be kind, caring and accepting of ourselves as we are, it is an easy move to accept others as we find them.  We can then enable others to be what they would be by listening to them empathetically.  We cannot, however, rescue them from self-deceit, self-indulgence or self-destruction any more than they can rescue us from ours. 

There is one person we need to satisfy in order for everything else to fall into place, and that is ourselves.  The more you try to be everything to everyone else, and never learn to say “no” and mean it, the further you retreat into the darkest corner of your own cage.  That “no” of course also extends to you when on a self-indulgent path.  Generosity of spirit is derived from a self-satisfied heart that also understands the wisdom of self-restrain.

If the way you behave fails to serve you and is inconsistent with what you say you value, you are out-of-step with yourself.  You are an accident waiting to happen, vulnerable to the inexplicable, blind to who you are and where you are going, poised to be unhinged, disappointed, embarrassed, and to spin out of control. 

No one can do for you what you refuse to do for yourself.  If your life is out of sync, only you can restore the balance to its desirable rhythm.  In the end, we are all left with ourselves.

Rollo May in Man’s Search for Himself (1953) writes:

Man must make his choices as an individual, for individuality is one side of one’s consciousness of one’s self.  We can see this point clearly when we realize that consciousness of one’s self is always a unique act – I can never know exactly how you see yourself and you never can exactly know how I relate to myself.  This is the inner sanctum where each man must stand alone.  This fact makes for much of the tragedy and inescapable isolation in human life, but it also indicates again that we must find the strength in ourselves to stand in our own inner sanctum as individuals.  And this fact means that, since we are not automatically merged with our fellows, we must through our own affirmation learn to love each other.

To that end, I wish you well.

*     *     *

Are You Passionate?

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

© May 30, 2014

There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves.  The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.  Passions usually have their roots in that which is blemished, crippled, incomplete and insecure within us.  The passionate attitude is less a response to stimuli from without than an emanation of inner dissatisfaction.

Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind (1955)

Before answering, you may want to consider what it means.  Passion could find you on the horns of a dilemma moving away from one cage only to find yourself in another.  This may ring counterintuitive to what you imagine passion to be, but on closer examination it might surprise you.  We tend to associate passion with intense feeling or being swayed by our emotions.  We don’t think of it as something moving away from as well as toward.  We don’t think of passion as conflicting. 

A passionate state of mind is associated with deficiency, not efficiency, with a lack of skill, not a surfeit of it.  The true nature of passion has been cleverly masked in the modern era by technological wonders.  Passion is all about dissatisfaction.

Dissatisfaction, whatever its cause, is at bottom dissatisfaction with self.  The fact that we pursue something with great passion does not always mean we really want it or have a special aptitude for it.  Often it is a substitute for something we want and cannot have.  Intense desire is perhaps a desire to be different from what we are. 

Passion as escape can be habit forming.  Many attitudes induced by discontent may also be induced by desire.  Intensity heartened by inner inadequacy initiates a release of energy, which can work itself out in discontent, desire, sheer action, or in creativity.

Exploring Passion

Passionate intensity can serve as a substitute for confidence otherwise born of talent.  The talented have no need orchestrate their skills in histrionic fashion as they can accomplish their tasks with the insouciance of play.  Equating passion with efficiency is missing the point.

Robinson Cano, formerly of the New York Yankees of Major League Baseball, now of the Seattle Mariners, a perennial All-Star, has been accused of being nonchalant in his style of play for the effortless way he goes about his business at the plate and in the field.  Cano epitomizes the confusion when passion and talent are treated as synonymous. 

The irony is that we have more affection for the hard worker than the effective worker, and a kind of resentment when a person is incredibly effective, as in the case of Robinson Cano, and seemingly without effort.  

In sport, when an athlete attempts to compensate for a lack of skill with passion, we call it “pressing,” meaning trying too hard or thinking too much about what should flow naturally. 

Alan W. Watts says Westerners have gotten it all wrong when they consider thinking to be hard work.  “There is no work to it at all,” he advises, then goes on to quote Zen:

Only when you have no thing in your mind and no mind in things are you vacant and spiritual, empty and marvelous.  That is why meditation or prayer are so compelling.  A quiet mind empty of thought is in touch with itself and nature.  It is free of intensity and therefore free of the cage of self-doubt, conflict, and self.

Passion displays itself most prominently during periods of pervasive social change and chaos.  In the midst of this, innovators distract us from our sense of dissatisfaction by canalizing our attention to new cars, gadgets, movies, TV programs, business strategies, health issues, sports celebrity gossip and medical “magic bullets.”  It is the lure of the scam in the cage of insatiable hedonistic yearning.

Eric Hoffer sees us as a society of misfits who have the ability to transmute dissatisfaction into a creative impulse.  The artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary, yet one creates while the other destroys.  He writes:

The times of drastic change are times of passion.  We can never be fit and ready for that which is wholly new.  We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test; we have to prove ourselves.  A population subjected to drastic change is thus a population of misfits, and misfits live and breathe in an atmosphere of passion.

Colin Wilson sees the misfit as the outsider in quest of truth.  According to him, the outsider finds himself living in a country of the blind and a world without values.  The outsider feels caught in a moral vacuum with the outsider at its center.  Wilson explains:

The Outsider’s case against society is very clear.  All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretense, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational.  He is an Outsider because he stands for Truth.

What the misfit and outsider have in common is a compelling drive to go against the grain; to think outside the box; to go it alone.  Not belonging, they try to find their way amongst the rubble.  They have eerily come to the forefront and are now setting the table.

Some of the attributes of the passionate misfit are discernible:

To be running ahead is to have something to be running from.

Desire creates its own talent.

Longing becomes a habit that dominates all activities.

Self-esteem is at root passion.

A gauge of passion is its unfulfilled desire for toys.

The drive of the revolutionary is to stir those to action who no longer know.

Unfulfilled desire is destiny.

To be in balance is to be at rest.  Passion is never at rest.

The self-sufficient straddles the fault line between the achiever and deceiver.

Social disturbance is at root a crisis in self-esteem.

True believers gravitate to the promise land of pride.

With a lack of talent, keeping busy gives a sense of worth.

The passion of the dreamer is either an urge to build or destroy.

Mass fervor emasculates passion which kills creativity.

In a universe of change, something is dying as rapidly as something is being born.  Since we are never ready, we are always surprised.  Forced to adjust, which is a radical departure from the status quo, self-esteem is threatened.  To convince ourselves that we are all right, we submit to tests created by those who believe themselves to be all right, and scoff at the legitimacy of the tests, but keep taking them nonetheless.  Let us look at this phenomenon from several perspectives. 

Ambient deficiency Motivation

Sociologist Billy G. Gunter sees us being habitually attracted to what we are not.  Gunter calls his theory, ambient deficiency motivation.  The theory gives the reader another gauge on passion.

Since passion is moving away as well as toward us, it could be said it involves dissatisfaction with the person we are and a desire to be what we are not.  These conflicting desires of the dichotomous self are known to play tricks on self-identity.

The synthetic self is observed in teenagers who dress in a way to define themselves separate from their elders but in league with other teenagers.  Entertainers Madonna and Michael Jackson set new trends in dress and style when they came on the scene.  Their synthetic self on display drew attention to a desired group and scorn from a despised one, conformist to the status quo. 

Passion is not on display but its deficiency with rings in ears, nose, lips, tongues, eyelashes, navels, nipples, and genitalia, which is to exasperate and attract, as exhibitionism has become the new norm.

We are young so short a time, and styles and fads change even faster.  A point has been reached where ritualistic and primitive mutilation of the body has become so common as to be boring. 

Take the phenomenon of tattooing.  This art form has been around as long as man has endured.  Now, it no longer has subtle implications or recognizable limits. 

Tattooing was once the domain of the rebel, but now tattooing has gone mainstream.  People, from the very young to the very old proudly display their tattoos as the human body has become a personal billboard with a public display of an instinctual search for the self.

In the past, people who mutilated or painted their bodies with needle artwork were peripheral to society.  Radical change has made the misfit an ideal type.  Now, the eccentric is someone without tattoos or an aversion to them.  Conformity has been converted to parody.

Not only celebrities but the drags of society sport body artwork in a common universal identity.  Gone primitive are CEOs, professors, college students, middleclass professionals as well as those in the upper echelons society as being branded has come to be distinctive.    

The crowd mentality personifies the times in a passionate quest for the authentic.  Outsiders have become insiders without choosing to be so, as others are looking for true connection with their mystique if not identity with their cynical world.  There exists a passion to emulate, imitate and replicate the mechanistic heart that this electronic age has given us, a cage that more than a billion souls call home.

As technology becomes more precise, people become less so; as the postmodern world becomes more surreal, society becomes less real. 

Biker gangs once considered “outlaws” are now adored and copied.  We see professional athletes not subjected to law, forgiven for their transgressions as long as they win.  We see parents adoring their children but not managing them. 

Growing up is no longer an option because it would admit to growing old, as that would in turn admit to dying, and denial of death is the new mantra.  Psychologist James Hillman, author of “The Soul’s Code” (1996), might see this identity crisis and new tribal norm as our collective search for the real parents of our soul.

Gunter’s ambient deficiency motivation fits an impressive collection: 

Walter Kennedy was physically impaired but rose to commissioner of the National Basketball Association (1963-1975).

Pete Rozelle created the Super Bowl, but was too small to play football.  He transformed the fledgling National Football League (1960-1989) into the national pastime taking that distinction from Major League Baseball. 

Bowie Kuhn, totally inept as an athlete, but with a burning love of sport, especially baseball, became MLB’s commissioner (1969-1984) during its contentious years, when expansion was also new and controversial. 

Howard Stern couldn’t buy a date in high school, and was known as “the stork” or “Dracula” for his long six foot six inch slender frame.  He would become a $500 million a year “shock jock” on radio.

Rush Limbaugh, has always had a weight problem and resembles the dumpy physique of the “Pillsbury Doughboy.”  The intellectual climate of college academics didn’t work for him, but intellectual neo-conservative talk radio did.  He would become an influential voice for the Republican Party, and a multimillionaire in a class with Howard Stern. Limbaugh and Stern were born on the same day and year, Limbaugh the Midwest, and Stern the East.

 

A cadre of television evangelists who preach “Hell’s fire and damnation” with unbridled passion are frequently trapped in that same fire, and fall on their own petards as adulterers, pornographers and embezzlers, some of ultimately confined to the hell of real prison.

We see ambient deficiency motivation in parents who punish their children for behavior commonly practiced by them, then wonder why their children are a problem. 

We saw Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little), once a drug dealer and petty criminal, convert to Islam and joined the Nation of Islam, become a strong voice for Civil Rights, only to be gunned down by three members of the Nation of Islam.  

In a frantic drive to escape the cage, many dream of an another self:  the profligate spender a banker; the prostitute a nun; the common criminal a police officer, the pedophile a priest; the failed athlete a coach; the wallflower an actress; and the poor student a professor.

Ambient deficiency motivation fits a person running from himself only to run into himself with a burst of passion.

 Passion: as negative & positive

History is replete with examples of ambient deficiency motivation.  St. Augustine of Hippo was born of a Christian mother and pagan father.  He rejected his mother’s religion when he went off to school in his early teens, and was attracted with passion to hedonism, sin, and a wastrel lifestyle.

He became a devoted student to Manichean dualistic philosophy, then was rescued from this by St. Ambrose who baptized him on Easter Sunday, 387 AD.  Next to St. Paul, it can be argued that Augustine has exerted the greatest influence on Christianity, both for Catholics and Protestants through his sermons, letters and his 22-book volume called The City of God (413 AD).   

  

There is also St. Thomas Aquinas to consider, who also fits into ambient deficiency motivation as he was thought to be a slow learner, possibly retarded because of his stuttering and reticence to respond quickly to his teachers.  Some historians reference him to being characterized as “the dumb ox.”

He was St. Thomas Aquinas that rescued the Church at its most critical juncture. The Christian faith seemed to be collapsing as reason threatened its dominance and relevance in the 14th century.  In his Summa Theologiae he argued philosophy examined the supernatural order in the light of reason, while theology did in the light of revelation.  Although reason used theology, revelation did not fall into the province of philosophy.  It followed that philosophy could not contradict theology because truth could not contradict truth.  Faith and knowledge were not mutually exclusive.

 

Thus, there would be two kinds of knowledge in the future: that which related to revelations, which would be the province of theology; and that which would deal with the natural world, which reason and philosophy could handle.  The result of this new understanding would one day be known as science.

Passion is a negative and positive force.  It can be expressed as a force for good, but equally as a force for evil.  We know Adolf Hitler, an Austrian citizen and corporal in the German army in WWI, blamed the Jewish selection committee after the war for his failure to win admission in the Vienna School of Fine Arts.  His twisted passion took this rejection as the logic for a lifelong hatred of Jews.  It led to his extermination policy and the Holocaust, an example of passion in the hands of evil.

How passion plays out has much to do with how we resolve conflict in our life.

 Self-demands & Role demands

Passion is subtle, multidimensional and can be self-realizing or self-defeating, manifestly good or patently evil. 

Passion has induced company sabotage.  Take the wildcat oil dweller of a major oil company who failed to receive the dollar per hour raise that he expected.  When drilling was nearly complete, he threw his wrench down the drilling shaft, destroying the diamond headed drill and causing more than $100,000 in damages to the rig, and hundreds of thousand dollars more in delayed operations. 

Less apparent but ultimately discernible are passionate passive behaviors described elsewhere as “six silent killers.”   Thwarted passion as passive behavior may be less spectacular, but far more common and therefore consequential. 

What happens is that the ideal self (how a person is expected to behave) and the real self (how he actually behaves) clash within the individual confusing self-demands and role demands resulting in the situation being poorly defined. 

The ideal self is an expression of the inner voice programmed into the individual by parents, teachers and priests and other authority figures.  The real self is how the individual encounters and deals with life.

A victim complex can easily develop from wounded pride and self-demands.  Role demands are driven by the nature of the roles we assume. 

Self-demands reflect immaturity with the individual fixated with an adolescent disposition.  Role demands reflect maturity and an adult orientation. 

When something goes wrong on a job the voice of self-demands shouts, “Not my job.  Can’t blame me!”  With role demands the response is, “We missed the deadline.  Let’s figure out what we have to do now to minimize the damage.”

Self-demands relate to comparing and competing, jealousy, envy, and spite for something, say failure to win an expected promotion.  Role demands relate to the job you’re getting paid to do.  If it isn’t working out, then you decide to move on.

Self-demands sees the company at fault when things go awry.  Role demands takes the position of being paid to do a job, and does it to the best of the worker’s ability. 

Self-demands feeds on paranoia, distrust, innuendo, anxiety, stress, chaos, conflict, confusion and ultimately self-doubt.  Role demands focuses on what is expected and what can be done. 

Self-demands pushes deeper into the cage of victimization.  Role demands bypasses the cage to focus on the fix. 

Self-demands plays on pride, “Do you know who I am?  What makes you think you can treat me that way?”   Role demands admits failure, “Yeah, I screwed up.  What would you like me to do?”  

The Mortality Dance

The passion to live on the horns of a dilemma is powerful.  Born of the fear of dying, temperance is thrown to the wind in false bravado: “I work hard and play hard,” as if hard is the operational word to passion. 

By the same token, passion can consume so much energy there is none left for contributing.  The passionate want a career but they’re not into changing jobs, going back to school, learning new skills, or starting afresh.  They want what they are doing now to be resurrected to career status as if Lazarus rising from the dead.  In truth, all passion is spent.  It can happen to anyone at any time, and does consistently to the passionate.  Consequently, it takes all the effort in the world to get out of bed in the morning.

The title of John O’Hara’s first novel, “Appointment in Samarra” (1934) illustrates this anxiety. 

The title is a reference to an old story of a merchant in Baghdad who sends his servant to the marketplace for provisions. Shortly, the servant comes home white and trembling and tells his employer that in the marketplace he was jostled by a woman, whom he recognized as Death, and she made a threatening gesture. Borrowing the merchant's horse, he flees at top speed to Samarra, a distance of about 75 miles, where he believes Death will not find him.

The merchant then goes to the marketplace and finds Death, and asks why she made the threatening gesture. She replies, "That was not a threatening gesture, it was only a shock of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra."

Metaphorically speaking, those afraid to live and are running from Death are sure to find it waiting for them in that cage of theirs 75 miles away.  Existing is not living, and for those waiting to live chances are they will run out of life before they find time to live. 

Those of such dispositions justify their lethargy and self-indulgence on the pantheistic philosophy of hedonism in mocking tribute to Hugh Hefner of the Playboy Empire.  

Not long ago Playboy celebrated its 50th anniversary.  Television showed Hefner and his confederates, a group of septuagenarians men of ample frame sitting around a long table smoking cigars and drinking brandy after scooting their beautiful female companions off, ingénues the age of granddaughters or younger, smiling in the camera and congratulating themselves on their bon vivant lifestyle, as if to say, “Don’t you (in television land) envy us?” 

This personifies self-demands in a culture in which role demands have been reduced to “making it,” with “making it” an end in itself.  This displays the “narrow self” as opposed to the “generous self,” where the focus in on getting rather than giving, on self-absorption rather than generosity.

There was no apparent sense of the incongruity in sending these demoiselles  off to other quarters to have coffee and smoke cigarettes while they engaged in worldly “man talk,” as if this were a 19th century redux den of iniquity. 

This misogynic time warp of 100 years past indicates a dislocation without appearing to be so with the atavistic misfit wearing the mask of death as celebrity.  I have written elsewhere:

Death is always beckoning from beyond.  The undertaker contemplates his funeral; the rich man his destitute, the jailer his imprisonment, the debaucher his impotence, the priest his fall from grace, the actor an empty theater, the writer the blank page, the dying man the absence of mourners.  What are these but premature visions of dying?

Hedonism is a Requiem High Mass without the purple robes or incense.  To accept death as inevitable is the first step to living.  That said you cannot deny the tort of spiraling pressure in everyday life in a climate of drastic change between need and want, pain and pleasure, as misfits and outsiders stir the cultural drink.  

A natural high has been augmented by Iron Man and Iron Woman Contests to release endorphins as a natural narcotic to the spirit.  Endorphins are neurotransmitters, chemicals that pass along signals from one neuron to the next. Neurotransmitters play a key role in the function of the central nervous system and can either prompt or suppress the further signaling of nearby neurons.

Endorphins are produced as a response to certain stimuli, especially stress, fear or pain. They originate in various parts of the body -- the pituitary gland, the spinal cord and throughout other parts of the brain and nervous system -- and interact mainly with receptors in cells found in regions of the brain responsible for blocking pain and controlling emotion.  Endorphins can lead to a better self or the explosive discord of self-destruction. 

This Mortality Dance is real for we are dying as we are living.  There is a desire in us to shed our unwanted self, the self that can’t keep up with change, can’t hold on to a relationship or job, the self that has become our enemy.  This unconscious drive of blind striving to escape the cage, only forces us deeper into the cage unaware as we might be. 

In the name of passion, we go from self-disgust to self-love and then back again.  The unwanted self is always there even if not acknowledged.  Fortunate we are that it is because it is a vital part of us.  We may assume a new self that is the opposite of the old self, but it is only looking at the same self as if from the other end of the telescope. 

We have a passion to change everything consistent with our new self.  In religion, this is called being “born again!”  Becoming an outsider to our insides is not becoming born again but self-estranged. 

Persons “born again” often become crusaders out to rescue alcoholics, drug addicts, spouse abusers, petty criminals, and so on.  Addiction is a choice, so the best medicine is not pontification but patient tolerance with attention to the possible cause or causes of the addiction.  Then it is up to the addict to do the rest. 

Gunter’s ambient deficiency motivation, Hoffer’s misfit and Wilson’s outsider know this well.  Hoffer writes:

If what we do and feel today is not in harmony with what we want to be tomorrow, the meeting with our hope at the end of the trail is likely to be embarrassing or even hostile.  Thus it often happens that a man slays his hope even as he battles for it.     

So, when you are attempting to govern your coefficient of passion, remember it is subjective and qualitative and something you want to do not something you have to do.  We, alone, decide whether to be self-creators or self-destroyers.  You get a pretty good reading of where you stand on this continuum.

Look at time – how do you spend your time?

Do you measure the joy or burden of it in chronological or psychological time?  Do you see time in terms of instant joy or delayed gratification?  Do you invest time in something today for its benefits tomorrow? 

Look at rewards – why do you need rewards anyway? 

What is more important to you, being recognized by others or knowing you have done your best and feel good about it?  Do you consider risks part of rewards or do you avoid risks and still expect rewards? 

Look at status – why do you do what you do?  Is it for the pleasure or recognition?  Are you a puppet on the string of status, or do you do what you do and let the chips fall where they may? 

Look at focus – are you a jack-of-all-trades and master of none?  Do you want to excel at something or are you afraid if you do others will think you arrogant? 

Look at values and priorities.  Are they yours or not?  Who creates your agenda?   Are you driven by security or challenge?  Are you running toward or away from your passions?

This checklist could have been placed first, but passion is not an easy street to walk much less cross.  We are constantly at the crossroads of helping and hindering ourselves and others.  It sometimes feels as if we are walking a plank above an angry sea, but that is only in our minds.  Our life, good, bad or indifferent is mainly our affair, and it is as easy or as difficult as we choose to make it.  Passion notwithstanding, the race to get ahead is not relevant, not relevant at all! 

*     *     *

  

Love What You Do!

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

© May 27, 2014

There is no true and more abiding happiness than the knowledge that one is free to go on doing, day by day, the best work one can do, in the kind one likes best, and that this work is absorbed by a steady market and thus supports one’s own life.  Perhaps freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do.

R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943), English philosopher and historian

The most important marriage in life, and the one that so often is chosen more by accident than design, is one’s life work.  Yet, what one does one becomes.

Work provides identity as much as it provides a means of sustenance.  It can either be love made visible or the darkest kind of self-enslavement.

“Man must work,“ writes 19th century American clergyman Henry Giles,  “but he may work grudgingly or gratefully; he may work as a man, or as a machine.  There is no work so rude that he may not exalt it; no work so impassive that he may not breathe a soul into it; no work so dull that he may not enliven it.”

Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman turned philosopher, loved manual labor because monotonous routine gave him ample time to think.  He never worked without a small notebook in his pocket and a small pencil.  An idea would spring into his mind, and he would jot down a couple of words to expand on later in the comfort of a lunch break, the sun beating down on his brow and his happy hand dancing across the page.  This is how he came to write his stunningly successful The True Believer (1969), a book that caught the attention and fascination of CBS Nightly News commentator Eric Severide.

 Severide conducted a series of television interviews with Hoffer, resulting in the author becoming a national celebrity and financially secure writer.  Did he quit his day job of working on the dock?  Not on a bet.  He told a reporter, who found it remarkable that a man with no formal education could write so profoundly.

“I can do that,” Hoffer confessed, “because my work on the dock is so impersonal.  My mind is not taxed.  I have the passion and energy to learn.”  His work blessed him and he blessed his work with many of his books still in print.  He once wrote a piece for the Sunday Parade magazine in which he celebrated the glory of routine manual labor.

Hoffer, an immigrant, blind at six with his sight not restored until he was nineteen, discovered a love for the printed word, not in a classroom, but in the public library, a place accessible to everyone.  He looked for the largest book with the smallest print, he says, with no clear understanding what he had chosen.  It was a book of essays by the French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1593).  He delighted in the taste of Montaigne’s words, his skeptical philosophy, and the rhythm of his mind.

This book opened his mind to view the world differently, not as he had, or thought he would prefer, but as he found it.  A reporter asked, “What is your system for generating ideas?”  Hoffer chuckled, having become used to others wanting a simple formula for him to explain his sudden fame.  He confessed politely that he had no system that his ideas came to him eclectically, like reading while standing on a corner surprised by some interesting author that might pass by.  We are all enriched today for the attention he gave that corner.

Not every worker is a writer, but every reader is a worker.  James Hillman, author of The Soul’s Code (1996), believes everyone without exception has a vocation.  We associate vocations with the religious, but Hillman insists we all have vocations.  It is in discovering and working on our vocation that we realize the true essence of our character, as well as our separate and unique individualism.

A person can be sullied, paradoxically, by too much or the wrong kind of formal education.  Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. noted his wife could have been a distinguished novelist but for having taken too many writing courses.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt once quipped to Interior Secretary Harold Ickes about Lyndon Johnson, then a twenty-eight-year-old congressman from Texas with a teacher college education, “You know, Harold, that’s the kind of uninhibited young pro I might have been as a young man if I hadn’t gone to Harvard.”   Johnson, of course, went on to become President of the United States in his own right.

It is so easy to put on hold what we would dream of becoming only to miss the rich experiences we have along the way.  So often a person looks back over a long life, and sees those wonderful times he had, but never appreciated, because he was too busy looking ahead.  More likely he saw those times as drudgery because they were things he had to do, not realizing they were making him into the person he would become.  Emerson writes:

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or worse as his portion; that though the wide universe if full of good, no kernel or nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.  Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none.  This sculpture in the memory is not without pre-established harmony.

The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray.  We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.  It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.

Each chip whittled off the shapeless granite of one’s being eventually produces a divine sculpture in the tradition of Michelangelo, as each seemingly insignificant job contributes to one’s ultimate character and completeness.  Emerson warns:

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.  It is a deliverance which does not deliver.  In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends, no invention, no hope.

A person is what a person does, not eventually, but now.  Whatever the job, be it part-time to assist in financing oneself through college, or a second job to add necessary income to the family budget, if it is done in love, it will blossom in kind.  Conversely, if it is belittled as many part-time jobs are, it will scorch the soul and produce venom and contempt.

How others see one’s work is as visible as a framed picture.  A person came to me who was fired from a part-time job, a jewelry store in a shopping mall.  She claimed the job was a no-brainer.

“I worked my ass off for this moron and this is what I get for this” adding the ethnic slur, kike under her breath to describe the owner.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“What’s it?” she replied, confused.

“That term you just used that you didn’t think I heard.  That is why you got fired.”

Self-righteously, she waved her cigarette in the air as if it were holy incense, saying each word with measured distinction. “I never said that word once to a living soul in that place.”

“You didn’t have to, the owner sensed it, and that was enough.”

She folded her arms across her chest.  “Your attitude was showing just as much as that sweater you’re wearing shows off your figure.

“You insulted his dignity, and quite frankly, you deserved what you got.”

I would like to report she learned from this experience, but unhappily, she did not.  She has wandered through life like a tumbleweed blowing hither and yon while blaming the wind and everything else for her misfortune except herself.

Love and work are mutually inclusive.  Kahlil Gibran calls work “love made visible.”  Together, love and work embody a synchronicity that merge work and play into one.  Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak turned their love of gadgets into making video games.  They didn’t stop there.  They went on to set the world on its head by bringing out the personal computer, “Mac,” and creating Apple, Inc.

They taught us a lesson about ourselves in doing so.  They exposed the fact that companies can become mind-blinded just as readily as the individual can lock stepping to a debilitating routine.  Once a set formula freezes a company or individual in a frame, it is nearly impossible to grasp opportunities although they exist right under our feet.

This happened to Xerox.  The lab people at Xerox created essentially the computer that Apple, Inc. would eventually market.  Xerox engineers were unable to convince senior management that personal computer was a marketable idea.  Xerox has never fully recovered from this faux pas.

So often in this competitive world, where compare and compete psychology dominate, companies are blinded from fully appreciating their assets, which are not found in P&L statements, but in the ingenuity of their people.

They are imprisoned in the corporate cage of old beliefs and practices, old attitudes and procedures, taking comfort in the absurdity, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!  As author William L. Livingston IV notes in his book Friends in High Places (1990), such companies maintain a strategy of ready, fire, aim!

There is nothing plain or simple about a job or career.  Animosity, although thought concealed, sticks out like an ugly blemish on the skin, as was the case with the jewelry clerk.

Attitude is always in full view.  Without a word spoken, nonverbal indicators leave no doubt.  President Roosevelt spotted a comer in Lyndon Johnson, and he was proven right.

The mentor senses potential in the neophyte.  It could be something remembered of his own earlier self, or in the case of Roosevelt a melancholy regret.  It is alleged that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy once confessed that if he could change three things, it would be his parents, his religion and his wife.  History reveals Kennedy wasn’t much of a mentor, as he never could distance himself from these conflicting intimacies, compounding the problem surrounding himself with like-minded nepotistic thinkers.   

Mentoring isn’t the romantic ideal it is thought to be, but a projection of the doer's visualization of the unfinished novice in terms of the doer's own struggle. 

What the mentor sees in the tenderfoot is neither showing nor hidden, neither a false self nor a true one.  It is the mature perspective of a doer against the possibilities of an emerging one.  Reality is the work performed at the moment.  Promise is just that, promise.  What Roosevelt saw in the clumsy, crude, amoral and aggressive Lyndon Johnson was a side of himself he kept hidden from his gentrified roots.

A mentor perceives the folds of complexity, the topsy-turvy implications that are truth unexplored that the unfinished doesn't know exist.

We don’t know who we are until someone tells us.  That is the important role of the mentor.  No one gets to where they want to go, alone.  Everyone needs help.  But the help is often rejected because it is ill conceived or falsely perceived.  Either the would-be-mentor is too timid or too bold, too circumspect or too subtle in the offering of help.  It is not easy to be a mentor.  On the other hand, exposure is crucial to the neophyte.

The tenderfoot works to attract attention to himself where influence resides.  Lyndon Johnson’s “uninhibited” style got the attention of the patrician President Roosevelt and paved his way to becoming a legislator in the US Congress of some distinction.

There was this colleague of mine at university who had a passion for farming.  He came from an Iowa farm family of nine generations.  His father, seeing conglomerates swallowing up independent farms in the district, was determined to save his son from this humiliation by seeing that he became a professional man. To please his father, he studied hard, got fair if not impressive grades, but his heart was always in farming.

One night in a college bull session, I said, “Mark, farming is your father’s vocation.  You talk of farming like it was a hobby.  Don’t you see the difference?”  Meekly, apologetically, in a little boy’s voice although twenty, he said, “Why can’t it be both?”  Why not indeed?

My friend stayed in school and took a law degree.  I wonder how happily so.  Many, such as Bill Gates, Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, turned the love of tinkering into a springboard to fabulous careers.  Jobs and Gates were college drop outs with the courage to pursue their avocation and turn them into vocations.  They did this as pioneers before the potential for the pc and software was known.  With tinkerers, serendipity is always in the air.

When International Business Machine offered Gates a contract loaded with constraints, he did not hesitate to sign.  “Big Blue,” however, failed to see the potential of this new technology.  So, IBM didn’t tie Gates down to licensing agreements.

Thanks to the IBM contract, Gates and his associates had the capital to create Microsoft, Inc., purchased the rights to what would become MSDOS and conceive Microsoft Windows.  The rest is history.  Like Xerox, IBM was blindsided by its failure to visualize cutting edge technology on the horizon.

One’s avocation can indeed become one’s vocation if one is not limited by facts.  Eric Hoffer writes:

The war on the present is usually a war on facts.  Facts are the toys of men who live and die at leisure.  They who are engrossed in the rapid realization of an extravagant hope tend to view facts as something base and unclean.  Facts are counterrevolutionary.

People, then, who pursue their avocation as vocation are rebels with a cause, a cause perhaps not too clear in their minds, but a cause certainly not blinded by fear or facts.

Think how the personal computer left giant IBM in the dust, a dust that has not yet settled, as “Big Blue” is still struggling to match the pace of the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of the world.

IBM, as with General Motors, was obsessed with facts: balance sheets; P&L statements; stock prices; customer preference.  IBM failed to see the future in the personal computer.  GM failed to see the future in the compact car until Europe, South Korea and South East Asia came to dominate that market

GM is still in love with the SUB and large trucks that increasingly resemble military tanks.  Consider this in the face of escalating crude oil prices.  These block-like gas guzzling cars and trucks still roll off the assembly line despite the current price of crude oil well over $100 a barrel.

Nor has GM made much of a concession in its car design to the narrow streets of Europe and Asia.  Surveys show Americans prefer “big” machines even as the American marketplace for “big” continues to shrink.  Facts.

It is facts that blind and confine, but not for rebels.  The giants are in a reactionary mode; the rebels in attack mode.  Young Davids are striking down Goliaths nearly every day.  And why?  They are not locked in to a system where departure from the norm is locked out.  

No longer is the knee jerk reaction justified, “I have to make a living.”  Nor is it necessary to pretend that the marriage of love and work are not negotiable.  Anyone can have a love affair with what they do.  All it takes is the courage to make pertinent choices.  There is little excuse for taking a job because the benefits are too good to pass up.

Corporate welfare is shrinking and will continue to do so.  Entitlements, which have never been tied to performance, are a luxury companies can no longer afford.  Nor is there much point in basing what you do on what other people think.  Even if their opinions are important to you, they don’t have to take residence in your head.

Save your energy, and in the process save your mind as well.  In terms of the job market, you have literally landed in paradise.  Never has there been greater diversity, mobility, opportunity and flexibility in the job market than now.

Often people tell me they hate their jobs.  When asked what they would prefer to do, they confess they have no idea.

An unexamined life is not worth living.

When people tell me, they can’t wait to retire, I ask them what they plan to do in retirement.  They invariably answer with the inanity, “I plan to travel.”  You can only travel so much.  So I ask, when you get traveling out of your system, what then?  They look at me with a puzzled expression.  It is clear they haven’t thought about that.  Then to stir the pot a little more, I ask, “What have you dreamed of doing if you only had the chance?”  It would seem they are even afraid to dream.

Someone asked my wife one day, “How do you feel about Jim sitting around reading and writing all day? Doesn’t that get on your nerves?”  My beautiful Betty replied, “I would prefer that to having him sit in front of television all day drinking beer and eating chips.”

As a personal aside, I retired the first time at 35 after completing an executive assignment for a chemical company in South Africa.  I had seen apartheid up close and personal, executive corruption and malfeasance, and the insensitivity of my religion to a changing world, and decided to take a “time out.”  I never gave a thought to whether I could afford it or not.  I knew it was what I had to do.

With a wife and four young children to support, and modest savings, I did little else for two years than read books, write and publish one (Confident Selling 1971), along with several articles for newspapers and magazines.

When I was nearly broke, I went back to school full time, year around for six years to earn my master’s and doctor’s degrees in social, industrial and organizational psychology, keeping the family together at an uncertain socioeconomic level by consulting on the side.

This economic departure from affluence to mere subsistence was a shock to the family, especially my eldest son who was not yet a teenager.  His resentment was carried into his mature years, but it did not stop him from earning a six-figure income doing what he has always loved to do and done best, the playing and teaching of tennis.  The others, less resentful, managed to find their way as well, but not all, however, doing what they loved.

I share this personal aside, knowing some will flinch when attempting to fathom the audacity of my conduct.   Not only has it worked for me, but I believe it can work for others.  I express this belief in my writing, which is cut from the same cloth as my empirical experience, or counter intuitive to conventional thinking.  .

One should feel no guilt for doing and being what makes one happy and productive.  It is a way of staying out of the cage of convention where misery is the common complaint.

Two things are required:

You are not afraid to be free or to love what you do, not afraid to enjoy work as if it were play.

You have the will and courage to make appropriate choices, not on the basis of what others consider "right choices" for you, but choices consistent with the content of your character and talent.

Before you can please others you must first please yourself.  Unfortunately, we are not programmed to seek self-contentment, yet that is the way we function best.  Too often we unwittingly assume the role of the victim and take residence in our cage, then blame others for the confinement.

Self-regard comes with the currency of joy, not with the bankruptcy of resentment.

It is much easier to be miserable at work resenting the company for not providing the desired satisfaction than to realize you are the company.  If you don’t feel you are the company, you are in the wrong company.  The company and job are blameless.

In point of fact, you are never going to have the independence, control, flexibility or potential earning power working for someone else.  There is a limit to what a company can provide.

That said if you are in school, stay in school, and get your degree.  The pay gap between college graduates and everyone else reached a record high in 2013 based on the analysis of Labor Department Statistics by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC.  Americans with four-year college degrees made on average, 98 percent more an hour in 2013 than people without a degree.  Although a college education can cost as much as $500,000, without a college degree will cost a person about $500,000 in lost earnings.  So, from a zero sum perspective, college is relatively free to the holder of the degree. 

On the other hand, despite all the hype to the contrary, most companies do a fair and equitable job paying for performance in what has been a fifteen year disappointing economic climate with rising inequality among those with and without college degrees.  For my younger readers, the decision not to attend college for fear it's a bad deal is an economically irrational decision given these statistics. 

Employers typically get a bad rap for not hiring, not investing, not expanding.  Start a business and be an employer for a short while, and you will understand how difficult it is to stay in business, and what a crap shoot it can be reading the economic tea leaves wrong.

A company can only do so much for its workers. A more important job is for workers to invest in themselves, which increases their capabilities to ride the economic roller coaster that the economy can sometimes prove to be.  Companies no longer have the wherewithal to assume the role of surrogate parent to workers that they did during the booming period (1950-1980).  Entitlements and union contracts put them in a corporate cage of which they still have not escaped.

A company today must stay lean and mean or it goes into bankruptcy.  A prudent company recognizes the pivotal change in the distribution of power and control and deals with it proactively.  The irony is that this costs companies far less than huge entitlements did in the past.  Knowledge workers want to contribute, but too often their brainpower is ignored and they revert to passive behaviors.  If will and power are an individual affair, so are dreams.

Several years ago, I was having dinner in Amsterdam with my European executive colleagues.  The conversation got around to our “dream job.”  There were five of us, all in comfortable economic circumstances with solid educations in technology, but not one of us in our dream job.

One wanted to be a farmer, even though he had never farmed in his life, another wanted to be a large newspaper editor, yet had never published an article, a third wanted to be a radio personality but had no media experience, a fourth wanted to be a general, but had never been in the military, and then there was me, who wanted to be a writer.

Before joining this company, I had had one book published and a score of articles in trade journals.  While with this company, I had written more than a dozen monographs, and was working on a book, which would become WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1991). 

What we dream is often as incredulous to our conscious mind as those obsessed with retirement, and thinking only of “traveling.”  Dreams rarely materialize into real experience, but they can become preoccupations.  As such, they encounter no risks or pain, no failure or disappointment, nor do they require any preparation or engagement.  In my case, I was working the problem treating my work as a laboratory for my writing.  For me, dreaming was the other side of reality.

Dreamers can confuse need with want, as need touches the soul and want only the appetite.  Need and want are worlds apart.  We need an automobile for transportation but we want a $150,000 golden buggy.  As basic as this is, many confuse the two.

If you could imagine work as an expression of happiness, everything else might look quite differently.  Happiness husbands our energy, which is always spiraling down.  German philosopher Martin Heidegger puts it plainly: As soon as you are born, you are old enough to die. 

Imagine the freedom this realization provides.  You appreciate every moment.  You have no time for being petty, vengeful, or self-pitying.  You are open to all possibilities.

You don’t wait for circumstances to be just right, you take charge!  You invest in the future by doing what is fulfilling in the present.  You realize life is short, and failure is life’s greatest teacher.  Failure is a wake-up call to the sleepwalker who marvels, once awake, that he is on the threshold of success.

Abraham Lincoln had so many failures that books are devoted exclusively to them.  Something within, however, kept him on task.  He didn’t let his lack of formal education hinder him; his failure in business; his failure to be elected to the US Senate, his failure to keep the nation whole once elected president leading to the Civil War, his failure to keep his favorite son alive, and his failure in marriage to provide his family with a sanctuary of tranquility. 

He however persevered.  When his generals failed him; when members of his cabinet talked derisively behind his back, when his wife became a yoke around his neck, when the war was going badly, he kept true to his role demands.  He was forgiving and understanding and had no time to carry a grudge.  Yet, he was a melancholy man subject to fits of depression.  Perfection is not parent to a cause, but its child.  He understood this and kept to his appointed task of healing the nation.

Power and will as Schopenhauer has shown is confrontational, conflicting, and contradicting.  Lincoln, despite his mild manner, had a despotic will.  He took command on the battlefield when his generals postured but failed to engage the enemy.  He relieved popular General George Brinton McClellan of his command and gave it to a reputed drunk, General Ulysses S. Grant.  He knew Grant was a soldier with a will to victory often at any cost, which was kindred to his spirit.    

Power and will defy convention and the expected and go against the grain of established practices.  You cannot read of Lincoln’s presidency without appreciating his constant thinking outside the box, or the magnitude of draconian measures taken to assure final and absolute victory, demonstrated in General Ulysses S. Grant's bloody campaign and General William Tecumseh Sherman's “March to the Sea.”

Without Lincoln's hard choices as president, we would not be the nation we are today.  Hard choices rise out of the will to power in the crucible of confrontation, conflict and contradiction, having little to do with harmony's way.

Choices define us.  It can be no other way.  We cannot be namby-pamby about our choices, and expect our will to prevail. Nor can we be all things to others and expect to be true to ourselves.  We cannot worry about how decisions will rest with others if they are not right with us.  Choices may be conflicting with others, but that is all right as long as they are not conflicting with who, what and where we are.

Find love in some kind of work and you will find love in life.  What could be more compelling and a greater reward?

*     *     *