WHY DON'T YOU WRITE MORE ABOUT POLITICS?

WHY DON’T YOU WRITE MORE ABOUT POLITICS?

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

© September 1, 2014

REFERENCE:

I’m often asked this question.  Each time there is another major upset on the international scene, it comes up.  Good people mainly through no fault of their own are caught up in the picture and from the frame of that picture produced by media. 

Brave people as journalists put themselves in harm’s way and become victims of the world in chaos often losing their lives.  But the world is always in chaos.  It has always been in chaos.  It will always be in chaos as it is not only the shifting plates of the earth that cause earthquakes, but the shifting balance of power that is just as tectonic.

A READER WRITES:

Dr. Fisher,

I so enjoy your essays.  Many of them are soothing, reassuring and confirming, as I often find myself thinking like you or being influenced by the way you think. 

I hate to turn on the television because it is one tragedy after another.  There are the Syrian refugees fleeting in the millions from their country heading for refugee camps with dirt floors and no heat or electricity much less adequate toilet facilitates.  I see mothers with tiny children unable to provide them with proper food or nourishment looking lost and forlorn.  My heart goes out to them, and I say, how could God allow this?

If it is not these terrible pictures, I see politicians wailing about how they will change everything if elected and I want to throw up or throw my shoe through the television. 

I once believed in God and in people.  Now I find I don’t believe in anything.  Am I a terrible person?

Why do you never write about politics and politicians the way you write about life?

Anonymous

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Dear Anonymous,

I’ll answer your last question first.  I don’t write about politics, per se, because I am not qualified.  I am familiar with corporate politics and I write about them in terms of pyramid climbers and corpocracy as a disease.  These things are in my books.

I do read books written by politicians, books written by academics, historians and journalists about politicians, but I must say the measured words I read in Foreign Affairs usually resonate with me more.  

Go to the library sometime and pick up a copy of this bi-monthly publication and you’ll see what I mean.  People who write for this journal are not histrionic, not polemicists, not your ego baiting charismatic center stage kind of people who crave to influence, but reasoned and reasoning thinkers.  

The most apparent drive of these contributors, it would seem to me, is to make sense of what seems nonsensical, often using a historical perspective to avoid getting our dander up.

What is happening now has most likely happened before in another context, as man and mankind somehow always seems to repeat the same foibles, but somehow to muddle through.  

In other words, Foreign Affairs contributors cool our jets by giving some perspective to national and international conundrums, and in the process, allow a little understanding to seep through our biases and beliefs.

If there is one thing I have learned in life, it is that reality is disturbing.  Consequently, we would like reality to be morseled out in small digestible dosages.  

And what is reality?

It is what we are experiencing right now, not anyone else, but us, personally.  

That is the only reality any of us ever knows.  That is, if we are willing to pay attention and then acknowledge what that reality tells us.  It is only that reality that we can control.

Now, if we know and control that reality, several possibilities exist. 

We can perceive that reality in terms that serve us honestly and honorably, and if we do that, chances are that reality will serve others equally honestly and honorably. 

Now, if we don’t perceive that reality, or deny its existence, no amount of activity to the contrary of that reality will spare us in the end. 

We can never escape the cage of our own making.  And yes, all of us construct some kind of cage, brick by emotional brick of our biases, beliefs, idiosyncrasies, obsessions, desires, fears, fantasies, values and hopes.

Politicians exploit the content of our cages to their advantage, and have since the beginning of time. 

Our only refuge is to know our own mind, its content, context and character, and to process information by careful scrutiny of that information as it relates to us, personally and professionally, and is consistent or at variance with what we know and believe to be true and right for us.

We live in an age of pedigree and credentials which has become surrogate for the aristocracy and the privileged of the past who once had their way with us without protest or challenge from us.  

History has seen us unshackle ourselves from this albatross only to find it being replaced by a more pervasive and subtle one, media dependency.

We are constantly bombarded by pundits, gurus, academics, and scholars, journalists and rabble rousers who tell us what we should believe and value and consider real and the best for us.  

They all, without exception, have a hidden agenda, and that agenda is power, a power designed to make us powerless and dependent upon their will and their designs for us for our own good.

By the state of the nation, and the world, we can see only how well they have succeeded.  Vladimir Putin as villain is the current poster boy of this dystopia, and yet he is only the prototype.

Ordinary people, good people everywhere, have been essentially programmed to depend on pundits, gurus, academics and scholars, journalists and rabble rousers to view the picture they have created as the picture that should past by our senses as reality and what that reality should mean to and for us. 

This is a travesty because what media, in the context of this collective group, presents and evaluates is chosen for us from tens of thousands of images of events and happenings across the globe.  Notice how often what is promulgated so often becomes incendiary.  

These events and happenings generate ratings, ratings generate profits, profits generate power, power allows media moguls to crown those who are to lead, often at our collective distress.

What can we do about this?  

I go back to my original point, which is to take charge of our own lives, to view everything in the context of our own personal experience and that reality.  Everyone is a leader or no one is.

There is another aspect of this pervasive dependency that deserves comment.  

Totalitarianism didn’t happen in a vacuum.  Nor did democracies that have little in common with democratic principles suddenly appear overnight.  

We, as a people everywhere, have become more concerned with security than freedom, more given to comfort than challenge, more inclined to denial than reality.  Those in power, or those pushing to achieve power know this about us.

We "hope," and that is the operational word, which is a bogus word, that everything will work out well in the end without our doing anything.

We vote for these titular heads we take to be our leaders to work out, when they are only the face of the shenanigans going on behind the curtain.

The heart of the problem, as I see it, lies in the displacement and extinguishment of conventional belief in God and conventional religion.

All religions, religions that have had no room for extremists, but displayed a fundamental understanding of right and wrong, good and evil, religions that were not yet kidnapped by politics, politicians and ideologues, religions that believed in personal responsibility and personal immortality, religions that were not yet emblazoned with existentialism, have all but disappeared.  

The cult of power has eclipsed belief in everlasting life and the sanctity of the human spirit.  This has been so complete that few contest the secular worship of the here and now as being all that there is, for according to this secularism beyond that there is only oblivion.  

The technological revolution has only added credence to that secular belief system and that understanding.

That is the hole I see left by the retreat of conventional religion from its mission into the politics of survival.

Religion has become little more than the voice of the ventriloquist to the puppet masters of the day.

We are a spiritual as well as a material animal with a conscience.  This has left us terrified on the outside and empty on the inside, prone to manipulation, and I don’t see evidence of this changing any time soon.

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