Compulsions of Wannabes

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

© June 11, 201

We make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars;

                            as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion.

Shakespeare, King Lear

                            

 Bodily exercise, when compulsory does no harm to the body; but knowledge, which is acquired under compulsion, obtains no hold on the mind.

Plato, The Republic

What would you do if nobody found out?

James R. Fisher, Jr., from a missive

There was a time when the center of our existence was the family, when the values and beliefs of that existence were unwritten, but understood, felt but not stated, controlling without the necessity of controls.  They are gone now, but we do not discard the past easily.  It haunts us like a bad dream, a countless reminder of what we have lost.  It has become a constant struggle that this loss does not cripple us.  Reminiscence of what we once had has become anguish rather than an anodyne.  What has happened and why?

The Cage of Hamlet

The cage of progress happened in all its many dimensions, stated and implied.  For this cage, we have become intimate strangers in a culture of celebrity.  Being somebody has become a national obsession with the notable shaping our world and bending our minds. 

We have gravitated to the bosom of the corporate to displace family centered existence.  In that world we overwork, cover up our mistakes, please our bosses and perpetuate the sickness of synthetic reality.  We over think and underachieve, equating formal education with enlightenment, clout with wisdom, and income with success.  It is the Hamlet Syndrome, where we are is not where we not to be and what we are we despise.  It is our cage.  We willingly enter this cage and spend our lives with an inability to decide between the heart and the dollar. 

To Hamlet, the heart was principle, conscience, and consideration of others, but distorted and weighted down by what was moral, spiritual and good.  And in his ambivalence family consciousness faded into paranoia as its centrist role.  The Hamlets of today are bright, sensitive, well-educated, middleclass and young, and like Hamlet, lost in their cage.  They want to preserve the purity of heart, but not at the expense of moderating their drive for success and affluence. 

Torn between the heart and the dollar they can’t decide what to do, so they choose to do nothing.  Inaction preserves the heart, but puts chasing the dollar out of reach.  As the years roll by and the Hamlets grow tired waiting to live, life slips out of reach and turns bitter, leading to frustration, cynicism, and much unhappiness.

So what do they do?  Do they break free of the spectator culture, where life is a second hand experience following the exploits of others in film, media, sports, and the arts?  Do they leave the safety cage of organization?  Do they reexamine their emptiness and wonder where their promise has gone? 

It would seem that many retreat deeper into the cage of the compulsions of wannabes, behavior fueled by such television programs as “American Idol.”  It explains the compelling status of scores of films, television programs, popular music, sporting events, and media awards.  Network television 24/7 news has been reduced to entertainment; politicians and political campaign to glamour contests, professional sports to surrogate war games, and academia to the role of remedial factories. 

Sex role identity has become so ambivalent that Time magazine (June 9, 2014) raised transgender to the tipping point with Laverne Cox prominently displayed on its cover.  Time states that an estimated 1.5 million Americans are identified as transgender.  This issue is symptomatic of what we are we despise in a culture of wannabes.  While most of the world is engulfed in survival issues, such as food, water and shelter, Americans have the luxury of contemplating their navel.  

More states are capitulating to public demands for legalized same sex marriages, along with decriminalizing the use of marijuana.  Medical science has indicated the regular use of marijuana results in loss of memory and emotional control.  No problem!  Meanwhile, children are still having babies with no appreciative dip in that trend.  At the same time, barely literate athletes are winning multi-million dollar contracts in the NBA, NFL and MLB, while communities are obliged to finance Olympic sized athletic stadiums to house sporting events that only one percent of the population ever use. 

Two mechanisms are apparent in this compulsive wannabe culture:

Money talks and money drives what formerly were legitimate enterprises.

Money chases the self-indulgent excesses of a passively oriented society.

We are in a time when the business of business is to meet the public demands of a society that “lets it all hang out,” but has no center, no moral compass, no reliable guidance system, and is anxious to the point of hysteria with little interest in anything other than being entertained. 

The markers are patently obvious: sports mania and celebrity craze parallel lifestyle excesses such as obesity, AIDS, workaholism, smoking, drinking, doing drugs, violence and crime.  We have lost the palliative resource of institutional religion, which has taken on the armor of the hawk in place of the downing of the dove, while universities have become factories to protect the viability of their franchise by elevating fees and watering down courses to the acceptable palate of essentially nonstudents.   

Have you ever wondered why we have the Iron Man & Iron Women Contests?


Why television sponsors survival contests where people do ridiculous things in front of cameras for a vicarious television audience? 


Why literally tens of thousands of young people aspire to be “stars” on American Idol and its copiers, when they might better put that effort to work in discovering their innate talent and rounding it into a fulfilling career?

Why there are such rabid fans for professional sport? 


Why we listen to celebrities when they endorse products or support political candidates, and we accept their narcissism as manifest wisdom? 


Why heads of state in the international arena coddle these celebrities and feign weighing their counsel? 


Why all of these people who are constantly in the limelight are treated as special or                    different?


Why the books we read are more often than not the works of celebrity authors? 


Why authors have become an important commodity in the selling of books?  


Why we listen to the same music with different words but the same beat; read the tenth or twentieth novel of the same author who simply changes the names of the protagonists while the hero always escapes in the end? 


Why we rush to attend films or watch television programs that beat a genre to death, and when it is finally dead, place it in syndication reruns until it is again beaten to death, then revise it into a news series or film with the same names, plot and dullness? 


Why we crave knowing the “100 Most Influential People in the World” selected by a publication (see Time, May 5, 2014), nearly a third who are in entertainment? 


Why this same formula is so effective in publishing the “500 Riches People in the World,” or the “Greatest Presidents,” or “Greatest Athletes,” or the “greatest” of anything? 


Why we covet all these awards for excellence when so often the purpose of the award is lost in the quest?  Why we put all this pressure on ourselves to value what someone else dictates is desirable? 

Whatever the answers to these questions might be they are the compulsions of wannabes whose activities and actions make for becoming an intimate stranger to themselves.  The variables may change but the conditions remain not unlike what Shakespeare understood. They told me I was everything, Shakespeare writes, ‘Tis a lie. 

People with a compulsion to be wannabes think that those they seek to emulate don’t suffer peaks and valleys; that they have risen above the mundane.  George Bernard Shaw writes: There are two sources of unhappiness in life.  One is not getting what you want; the other is getting it.  Wannabes are destined to hit this wall.

Why society has so much emphasis on appearance and so little on substance is the inconsistent dilemma of our times.  What you see is not what you get.  The pressure can become maddening if you don’t take a “time out.” Then you could see how life resembles a treadmill, with you as a mindless gerbil in a cage spinning the wheel and going nowhere. 

When you think about the self-imposed madness in the world, you have to wonder why.  Why is this so?  Obviously, many are at the ready to rush in to fill this vacuum with answers, but of all the cages described in this book; the cage of compulsive wannabes is perhaps the most confining, self-defining if not the most self-destructive.

Take the competent engineer.  Once he is promoted into management he proves to be an incompetent executive because as a compulsive wanabe he was blinded by the prospects of pay, perks and prestige, but ignorant of the job.  Once in that management role, however, he finds the work unstimulating and misses his engineering prowess.  But he can’t go back!  He is now used to the ambience.  He is locked in his cage with him holding the key.

This engineer-manager’s frustration can lead to embarrassing or untoward behavior as the job and environment feed his emptiness and lack of worth, while management promotes the idea of his value-added status.  No longer is what needs to be done the focus but what best supports the brand.  Lost in translation is personal satisfaction and authenticity.  Should he be conscious of this, as many are, this can lead to health problems and seed emotional disturbance.  It is not an easy life being a compulsive wannabe.

Fast Track Blues & Compulsions of Wannabes

With so much external pressure, it is difficult for our conscience minds to track our blues.  Tennis sensation and five-time Wimbledon champion Bjorn Borg opines:

It is very difficult for people to admit that they do not enjoy what they are doing.  Too many people try to tell themselves their job is great when, deep down, they do not enjoy it and refuse to face reality. 

This extends to those happy in work but with compulsions of wannabes.  Contentment is considered a trap when it is the only road to freedom. 

We saw this fast track blues in the competent engineer who became an incompetent executive clearly because he was nostalgic for what he knew, engineering, and had contempt for what he become.  But this malady is not limited to engineers.  Let us say the person in the new role is as miserable as Bjorn Borg suggests, what then?  Do such people go back into the work that gave them satisfaction?  Hardly!  They can’t take the pay cut. 

The same question can be asked of the competent teacher who becomes an incompetent administrator, the priest the vacillating bishop, the scientist the flummoxed research director, and so on.  People who move from their basic orientation into a different role either make the adjustment, remain miserable, or wait for circumstances to force them to make a change, usually too late to regain their original momentum.

Regarding those who make the adjustment successfully a peculiar thing happens: they remake the new role by integrating it into the old role.  I was first a chemist, then an executive, then an industrial psychologist.  If you examine my empirical writing, it should be obvious that being an executive was treated like a stoichiometric equation, as was the case when I became an organizational/industrial psychologist.  I have worked with psychologist who were first accountants, finding their approach similar to their original discipline.  Indeed, the first love of B. F. Skinner, the famous behavioral psychologist, was music and mathematics.  No surprise, behaviorism has much in common with proportion and balance integrated from both disciplines.

Handling bureaucratic management is fulfilling to some, but dull, repetitive, and routine to others.  The irony is that people are promoted because of competency in what they are doing, which is frequently light years away from the skill set required in the new position.

Dr. Laurence Peter captured this phenomenon in his book “The Peter Principle” (1969).  An educator, he based the principle on his own experience seeing people getting routinely promoted to the level of their incompetence, a common disorder in the complex organization.  

Complicating the picture further, there are people gifted with enabling skills that management requires, people who are not intimidated by those more gifted, or more skilled than they are.  Such people would make great managers, but rarely get promoted.  Conversely, egos often gets in the way of managers who are easily intimidated by the more gifted for they have the compulsions of wannabes.  Consequently, rather than being enablers, they surround themselves with like thinking surrogates.  Reality and work get lost in the equation.  They opt for sycophants believing they will get the work done, however they usually don’t.

The New Normalcy

Warren Harding (1865 – 1923), one of our least distinguished presidents, campaigned with the slogan the “Age of Normalcy.”  He declared in 1920: After months of living in a state of tension, all yearned for a return to normalcy.  It was after WWI that normalcy was sought in terms economic, political and social stability.  President Harding couldn’t have been more wrong. 

Instead, it was the “Roaring Twenties” with prohibition, bootlegging, mob racketeering, and wide corruption even in Harding’s own cabinet.  Ernest Hemingway called this period the “lost generation,” with many American ex-patriots seeking solace in Europe.  We seem to be going through a similar self-estrangement nearly a century later.

In the new normalcy, self-definition and self-evaluation are based on achievements and success; self-worth on what we do and what we have.  Normal Mailer writes: It is a law of life that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.  This is another way of saying the compulsions of wannabes has become the norm.

It is not enough to be a good provider for one’s family, but one must give friends and acquaintances a sense of progress in one’s work and life.  A new word gained credence, “esteem.”  The self has become the home of esteem.  We worry continuously about “self-esteem” when this is a solipsism at its worst because answers are never found in the “self” but only in the engagement of “others.”  What we do is where worth is found, not in what we are.  

Career professionals have become increasingly narcissistic, where work defines and describes them completely.  This cage can be quite confining.  How often you hear married couples complain, “All we do is work.  We have no other life.  Our work defines us totally.  We have absolutely no time for each other much less ourselves.”  Notice they are in Plato’s cave.

The merging of career identity, self-worth, and work now provides the framework for what is considered normal for the well-adjusted.  This rationale makes it difficult to say, “Enough already,” and to get off the treadmill.  After all, the new normalcy accepts stress, hypertension, burn out, and fatigue as part of the drill.  So, if you can’t legitimately get off the treadmill, what do most careerists do? 

They build bigger and bigger houses with nice cottages on their favorite lakes, homes that they seldom can enjoy because they are at work or traveling, and cottages that they can seldom visit but instead rent out because they can never find time to vacation.  They take their pleasure in driving the biggest and most expensive automobiles made, and have several of them, order rare antiques and bid on even rarer paintings and sculptors to grace their homes.  This gives them the artificial ambience of a movie set.  To keep their energies at red alert they acquire harmonizing habits that range from hedonistic secret assignations sandwiched into business trips to a menu of sleeping pills, uppers and downers, and booze. 

Destabilizing as these behaviors may be, nothing matches the addiction to power.  Power can quickly fan the flames to release the underlying need to belong and to count for something.

A peculiar thing happens.  To compensate for the lack of power, they exaggerate what they have and do.  They become obsessive plotters for the desired position and for the departure of those who stand in their way.  Surreptitiously, they undermine the reputation of superiors, and pursue opportunities to maximize visibility while torpedoing the efforts of associates. 

They are adults with the deep need of children to be loved and appreciated.  All their lives they have been driven by demanding parents, pushed to develop their intellectual powers and natural talents, which in turn become the instruments to success.  This finds them driven to do more, be more, constantly performing to win applause and approval of a select few whom they feel they need to impress.  They think they are in control but are totally out of control. 

It never occurred to them along the way that the need for glory was fed by the hidden need for love first from parents, then parent surrogates, who paradoxically, were most likely caught up in the same treadmill existence as they were.

With the compulsions of wannabes, they are determined to reach the rarified air above the crowd.  Should they reach such heights, the great surprise is to find the same treadmill constructed there albeit on a higher stage.  Celebrities across the spectrum whine about this reality once encountered but never blame themselves.  Nor do they choose voluntarily to leave, and seek other more suitable work and accommodating conditions.

Compulsions of Wannabes and Addictive Organizations

Everyone lives and works in some kind of organization.  It begins with the family, moves on to school, then the workplace, clubs, and civic organizations.  Most of us spend our lives in some organization, and are functionally handicapped if organizational life does not suit us.  The key is choosing that organizational life that fits.  Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries and Danny Miller describe in “The Neurotic Organization” (1984) five types of organizations: the dramatic, depressive, paranoid, compulsive, and schizoid.  Most of us work, or have worked in one or more of these neurotic organizations.

Compulsive wannabes function surprisingly well in these neurotic organizations because the top executive exhibits one or more of these characteristics.  The neurotic style of the chief executive produces certain decision-making and strategic characteristics.  Kets de Vries and Miller see that some neurotic executive styles are compatible with the firm’s environment.  They also suggest a “healthy” mixture of neurotic styles can ensure corporate success. 

Psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi confirms this but from a different perspective.  In “A First Rate Madness” (2011), he links leadership and mental illness, citing such notables as Lincoln, Churchill, Gandhi, FDR, JFK, Ted Turner and Martin Luther King, Jr., as suffering from this condition.  These obvious doers, men of historic dimension, Dr. Ghaemi suggests are compulsive wannabes who have galvanized illness into dramatic s leadership.   

In one sense, the addiction of compulsive wannabes is a process that takes over a life that leaves the addicted powerless to do anything about it, that is, unless and until it fuels motivation as melancholy did Lincoln’s.

The compulsions of wannabes are not primarily physiological as many others are, but mainly a trick of the mind, a psychological deception followed by behavioral compulsion that controls the way to think and feel to the point that the only thing valued is the vicarious one that dominates the mind.  Low brows and high brows have this in common, only high brows are often rescued by the god of history, whereas history feeds off the lowbrow.  Read “A First Rate Mind” or any giant of history and you will see how this holds true.  

Compulsive wannabes may go to great efforts to imitate in dress and manner, lifestyle and habits that of their favorite celebrity or hero.  Addiction, whatever it is, leads to an increasing compulsiveness in behavior, which can run afoul.

An organization can be addictive.  Procter & Gamble became obsessively compulsive about its trademark, when detractors found this emblem satanic. [1]

Years ago, when consumer advocate and perennial presidential candidate Ralph Nader, only in his 20s, and fresh out of Harvard, wrote “Unsafe at Any Speed” (1969), a book about General Motor’s Corvair automobile, GM had more than a score of private investigators following his every move for months, looking for incriminating evidence to discredit his advocacy.  When reporters got drift of what GM was doing – this was years before Michael Moore, who incidentally is no Nader – GM crawled into its addictive organization and has never come out. [2] The neurotic atmosphere is palpable.  You can detect it as everyone is managing up, careerists are constantly campaigning for the next job, finding little time to do the job they already have, with everyone wanting to be somewhere else doing something else.

An addictive organization is a closed system.  Roles and behaviors, thinking and tolerances are defined, documented, and executed within heuristic limits.  Not surprisingly, addictive organizations call for addictive behavior.  They invite whomever joins them to quickly adapt to the addictive climate and thinking patterns.  If they don’t, they either leave, retreat into silent passive behaviors, or are terminated. 

Typically, in the addictive organization, slogans plaster the walls while hidden surveillance cameras and intrusive software blanket the activities of the workplace as if George Orwell’s “Big Brother” was on the premises.   

In my consulting career, I spent several months with a metropolitan police department conducting an intervention.  I saw young recruits hired with high ideals only to become cynical veterans in a matter of months.  The culture supported cynicism.  If these recruits resisted the pressure to conform, they were not fired, but ostracized from the group by not being invited for drinks after work, or group family outings.  After a time, they would leave.

The addictive organization operates from the same characteristics that the individual addict routinely exhibits.  There is denial that a problem exists.  A constant feed of mixed messages from management leads to confusion in operations.  This confusion in turn leads to ambivalence where no one takes responsibility when something goes wrong because no one is at fault.  Confusion becomes the norm, and crisis management the routine.  Instead of crisis management being an embarrassment, it is rewarded and perpetuated. 

Self-centeredness is a prominent characteristic of addicts and it is no less so of the addictive organization.  The compulsion of wannabes thrives here because the “fix” separates them from everybody else.  Instead of technology being user-friendly to everyone it is proprietary to the elitist group.  Usually this is engineering in the hi-tech facility where the saying prevails: Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others. When someone asks for help, the seeker is likely to be punished with jargon.  

Dishonesty and the disingenuous is common.  We have had dishonest unions and industrial companies that have bilked employees of retirement assets, duplicity in government such as Watergate and Benghazi, savings & loan institutions that have mishandled accounts, the list goes on.  Addictive organizations are consummate liars, even when the truth would better serve them, throwing people off course to what is happening.  Compulsive wannabes often find careers as spin-doctors as dishonesty is given legitimacy. 

Absurdly, perfectionism can be obsessive to the addictive organization where the policy is to do everything right the first time, which means the critical 20 percent that make 80 percent of the difference receive diluted attention.  This leads to keeping double books demonstrating a sick hold on perfection. [3]

The frantic drive to rise above implacable odds is bane to the compulsive wannabes (individuals and organizations alike) as they see failure no matter how successful or acclaimed when they have not yet risen to the pentacle of their wannabe.  This obsession drives them to take wild risks, which leads to colossal failures followed by elaborate cover-ups. We saw this with a bank in Illinois when it pushed to be the seventh largest bank in the United States. [4] It echoes the sentiment of the late Vince Lombardi, coach of the NFL Green Bay Packers: Winning isn’t everything; winning is the only thing!

Compulsive wannabes and addictive organizations share another characteristics, the scarcity model.  There is an abiding belief that there is not enough opportunity to go around.  Therefore, efforts of others must be compromised or sabotaged, while self-limitations denied.  Consequently, they compute progress on the basis of the amount of attention they receive in pursuit of the prize, and are hell bent if it is found lacking.  I can recall a person going into a tirade because another person had been in the boss’s office fourteen times that week and he only five times. 

Recently an internationally respected drug company was exposed as selling a painkiller that had for years been knowingly killing people.  It was kept on the market and not taken off because it had FDA approval.  Besides, in the name of scarcity, the company claimed there was nothing to replace it, and for its slight disadvantages, the killing of a small percentage of people, it was giving relief to millions who would otherwise not have it. [5] 

Still, there is no addiction quite like the frantic illusion of control.  Years ago when I was with an international Fortune 100 company, I marveled at how orchestrated the shareholders’ meeting were.  Virtually every minute was accounted for.  Questioners were planted in the audience, while literally hundreds of possible questions were scuttled.  Nothing was left to chance.  Likewise, anyone in a sensitive position who did not buy the company line, lock, stock and barrel was a target. 

Compulsions of Wannabes as the Working Wounded

John Lennon once said: “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”  Shortly before he was murdered, only forty, he gave reporters his reasons for having retired five years earlier.  He said he realized that he had become caught up in a career trap, always having to produce something, keep the career going, churn out a new product, and that this commitment and expectation prevented him from clarifying to his mind what was really important in life.  He came to see the danger of a person’s career becoming so important that it blocked out everything else, especially the development of love relationships and values that have deeper meaning than what one is left with after sacrificing everything for getting ahead. 

Lennon understood we are 20 percent thinking beings, which is the outside world we encounter, and 80 percent feeling beings, which is the inside world that dictates our level of contentment.  Albert Camus writes: Without work all life goes rotten.  But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.  We see evidence of this again and again as compulsive wannabes put everything into their careers and put on hold their personal lives, which is to say their values, levels of satisfaction, and ultimately, their emotional health.  These compulsive wannabes may best be described as the working wounded. 

In the entertainment business, compulsive wannabes put all their efforts into being successful, and are often found to be “difficult.”  What they expect from their celebrity never seems to measure up to the fulfillment they seek.  Celebrated comedian Bob Hope came to the University of Iowa when I was a student, and found himself facing nearly an empty Fieldhouse.  So incensed was he that he cancelled his appearance and took his crew over to the US Veterans Hospital on campus, and gave a free show to the appreciative hospital staff and ex-military personnel.

The irony is that compulsive wannabes have a lot in common with the celebrities they admire.  Both are interested in escaping who they are to be this fictive person they have created or wish to escape to.  A manic state possesses them with the hidden downside taking the form of conflict within and hostility without.  They may display a neurotic temperament and develop problems associated with anxiety, depression, chronic indecision, fatigue, and diminished capacity along with feelings of guilt, paranoia, and accompanying physical ailments.  Marilyn Monroe became a legend for displaying Pandora’s complaints.  Yet in this crucible of agony, it often triggers magnetic and majestic performances.  

It is difficult for the working wounded to demonstrate angst with a boss who is a compulsive wannabe, especially when that boss is having second thoughts about elevating that person, Dirk Edwards, to a top executive position.  Yet this candid exchange did take place: [6]

Boss:     I get the feeling I want you to be more successful than you want to be.

Dirk:  Define success for me.

Boss: Well, making an impression on the (European) affiliate general managers, keeping our corporate fathers happy in the United States, keeping me out of trouble.

Dirk: What about operations?

Boss: What about them?

Dirk: What if doing something significant requires making some people uncomfortable, making you unhappy?  What then?”

Boss: You don’t do it.  You’re only over here a few years.  Don’t try to be a hero.  Remember, all I want is to make you successful.  That’s my point.

Dirk: What do you think motivates me?

Boss: What motivates you?  What motivates us all: pleasing the boss, promotions, belonging to the club, making the bucks, getting the perks, being able to provide comfort for the family, right?

Dirk: What motivates me is challenging work, the freedom and control to do it in my way, and your trust, respect and support when I fall short of the mark.  Money has little to do with my motivation; nor do promotions, perks or status.

Boss: Bullshit!

Besides illustrating a strained relationship between the two men, it reveals a clash in values.  The boss, a vice president, clearly expected Dirk, a director, to have the same compulsive mindset of the addictive organization to which they both belonged.  Both men, however, lived in separate realities: the boss had a high need to please others; Dirk had a high need to please himself. 

Values conflict has its roots in the New Age of Work.  Technology is reshaping the landscape of work.  Knowledge is the seat of power and bosses are much less important than they once were.  Much repetitive work can be done electronically, while other grunge work can be done by robotics.  The New Age of Work has taken a quantum leap from manual effort to mental discipline.  Addictive organizations demonstrate little capacity to acknowledge this or to surrender position power to data storing and retrieval systems that now control and manage “things.”  

Just as conventional warfare has disappeared with an army no longer encountering a discrete enemy, the merging, shrinking and dissolving of corporations have left addictive organizations with atavistic leadership out in the cold.   Compulsive wannabes still are bent on soaring to the top only to find nothing is there.  Meanwhile, nerds who were reluctant hires now set the table with no interest in compulsive wannabes on their teams. 

Meanwhile, the working wounded experiences a range of stress and conflict as technology, not only at work, but also at home has become a “megabyte mistress.”  Spouses often complain that their partners spend overly long hours on their laptops or iPhones, and become withdrawn, unresponsive, and uncommunicative, eventually giving commands to family members as if they were computers. 

Compulsive wannabes with a laptop or iPhone can avoid faces, voices, or names, which has the potential for contributing to emotional detachment and alienation, while fostering the illusion of control.  The trauma of the New Age of Work is moving the individual and corporation toward more addiction with the high flying compulsive wannabes carrying the banner of high tech.

The Beginning of the End

Imagine parents grooming a child from birth to be a “star” to fulfill a dream never realized.  The child is expected to fill a niche, not find one.   

We have moved away from a consensus of what it is to have a childhood, to experience the joys and innocence of an undefined and fluid world of unbridled experience. 

Children as young as four know definitely what they plan to be.  I know a child now in the third grade with both parents’ medical doctors, who has a regiment of reading five books a week of increasing difficulty.  She watches no television, knows nothing about the current electronic play station games her classmates talk about, and relates poorly to them.  She is an exceptional student, receives acclimation for her academic excellence, but is never invited by classmates for night stay overs.  . 

Now, there is nothing wrong with being a budding scholar, but the compulsion can obliterate the balance and exquisite wonder between the real and the imagined that is endemic to childhood, or at least it once was.   

A person has essence and personality.  Essence is the child’s DNA.  Personality is what is acquired.  Essence is owned.  Personality is rented.  Essence cannot be lost or changed.  Personality can be lost and changed with circumstances.  Personality can be injured psychologically, essence physiologically. 

Essence is the basis of the child’s physical and mental make-up.  Obviously, this young lady described above has an affinity for the printed word.  It is a learned skill, but fed by the capacity to read and absorb information.  Mental dexterity is part of essence.

Personality is learned behavior, consciously and unconsciously or subliminally.  Conscious imitation of others plays an important part in the building of personality.  Earlier we discussed how comparing and competing can become a cage.  This cage can erode personality to rely on second hand experience for identity.  Even instinctive functions, which should be free from personality, can become acquired tastes, such as likes and dislikes. 

It is a long road to become a medical doctor.  The little girl who is the reading machine has parents who have taken that road.  A medical career is in her sociobiology as well as her genetics.  No doubt the professional demands of her parents have left little time for their daughter.  Now, the question could be ask is medicine a burning need, or is this a desire to win the approval of her parents?  In other words, there is an element of a compulsive wannabe here. 

Likes and dislikes can play an important or disastrous part in life.  You would think we would like what is good for us, and dislike what is bad for us.  But that is often not the case, especially 80 percent feelings inside and 20 percent thinking outside are out of balance. 

When essence and personality are in balance, you don’t take up smoking because your peers do; you don’t take up drinking because it is cool; you don’t cheat yourself by skipping school to be accepted by the “in” peer group; you don’t get into drugs or other aberrant behavior because friends do.  And in the case of the little girl cited here, she doesn’t read books to the exclusion of everything else.  On the other hand, when personality begins to dominate essence, the person comes to like what is bad in deference to what is good for him.

Personality is necessary but not sufficient to provide stability.  Essence is needed.  Stated another way, one cannot live without personality or essence as both should grow in parallel to have a healthy vigorous life.

Cases of essence outgrowing personality may occur among uneducated people.  Stereotypes of this nature have been labeled crackers, pick-up truck rebels, red necks, and mountain people.  What distinguishes them is that they appear different, and take pride in this distinction.  They may be good, even clever, but experience difficulty developing the same as other personality types.  They often are disinclined to new information as they feel they already know.

Cases of personality outgrowing essence are often found among cultured people as there essence is either half-grown or underdeveloped in deference to a sophisticated patina.  Great Britain’s King Edward VIII, who resigned in 1937 after a year at the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, has been described in such terms, having given state secrets to the Germans prior to WWII.  

When I lived in South Africa and was facilitating the formation of a new company, it was soon apparent that South African Brits had the golden tongue and swagger and held the executive positions as they ruled business, while Afrikaners controlled the technology.  Afrikaners were plain spoken, industrious and down-to-earth in manner and decorum.  They were our chemists, lab technicians, engineers, and scientists with the technical skills that were needed in the new company.  They stayed in school taking advanced degrees, while being of modest inclination, while the Brits lived in colonial splendor.   

With the “empire mentality,” personality flourishes with a quick and early growth of personality, while essence can practically stop at an early age.  This can result in people being outwardly grown-up, but inwardly remaining emotionally twelve-year-olds.  Actors, for example, may have the patina of substance but they are always acting a part.  Sir Lawrence Olivier, the great British actor, once chimed: “People see me as a great lover.  This is an act.  I have neither the energy nor the will to oblige them.” 

At the other end of the celebrity scale, blue-collar workers have been programmed since WWII to be compliant, which has resulted in their arrested essence.  Obliged by industry to be things or interchangeable parts in its machine, they were programmed in conformity, obedience, politeness, discipline, punctuality and passivity.  This has resulted in their collective emotional maturity and personality of dependent children suspended as  30-40-50-year-olds in terminal adolescence. 

There are many other conditions in postindustrial, postmodern society that favor an underdeveloped essence.  Take the mania for electronic reality play station games.  Many children and indeed adults are obsessed with these games.  They can effectively stop the development of essence at such an early age that essence.  

Personality evolves from interpersonal influences, programmed reinforcement, social and life experiences.  From this, attitudes and appetites are established.  Personality is equally important to essence but not at the expense of essence.  Personality does not want to know the truth about itself, for to know the truth would mean to abandon its falsely dominant position.  It is no accident that we are in the “Age of Personality” which is synonymous with the “Age of Anxiety.” [7]

 

Compulsive wannabes bet the house on “making it” and accept imbalance, disharmony, and the false self as the price.  Lewis Carroll captures this when he has Alice say in Through the Looking Glass (1871):

Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.  If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

In this “Age of Personality,” what is acquired not owned dominates. This has spawned a celebrity culture with the focus on entertainment, media, sport, and celebrity with little attention to the self in everyday life. [8]  Performers can escape into another character in a drama, project the knowing of a seer by reading a teleprompter with 24/7 news alerts, or throw, kick or hit some kind of ball to the escaping delight of admirers where compulsive wannabes can bask in passive glee as vicarious bystanders. 

It is not limited to these obvious pretenders, but we see it in professors who have students do their research if not write their articles, executives who take the credit for the performance of others, and parents and teachers who compensate for their own failures by pushing their progeny as students to heights they refused to climb themselves.

Compulsion of wannabes, as Shakespeare has shown, can reveal a crippling disease, or the plight of the Hamlet Syndrome.  Thoughtful, inquisitive, lovingly raised, encouraged to be trendsetters, they are long on potential and short on achievement.  They could go for the brass rail of show business, sport, media or political office, but are instead driving a delivery van, sorting mail, waiting on tables, painting houses, or hauling garbage.

Torn between desire and duty, they avoid the conflict after the first failure, and take up unchallenging work.  As the years go by, they grow wary and bitter, working paycheck-to-paycheck, blaming society for their frustration, becoming cynical and self-loathing, echoing the sentiment of Hamlet:

O shame! Where is thy blush? Rebellious hell,

If thou canst mutine in a matron’s bones,

To flaming youth let virtue be as wax,

And melt in her own fire: proclaim no shame

When the compulsive ardour gives the charge

Since frost itself as actively doth burn, 

And reason panders will.

                                                          Shakespeare, Hamlet

The beauty of life is that it is never too late to make a corrective course, to walk out of the cage of compulsion and conduct life on one’s own terms while becoming a part of the mainstream.  It is not only possible, but also probable and the reason for my writing this book.

*     *     *

[1] James R. Fisher, Jr., Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, TATE Publishing, 2014, pp. 163-165.

[2] General Motors has been plagued with problems.  In 2014, a switch problem necessitated the recall of millions of vehicles.  A cover-up was discovered with several lead engineering executives fired. 

[3] James R. Fisher, Jr., Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge, TATE Publishing, 2014, pp. 212-230.

[4] Ibid, pp. 205-206

[5] The pain killer in question is Zohydro, which contains the very same ingredience as Vicodin (hydrocodone), but is five to ten times more potent.

[6] This is an actual conversation only the names have been changed.

[7] P. D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, Vintage Books, 1974, pp. 42-46.

[8] Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Anchor Books, 1959, pp. 141-166.