"THE PRINCIPLE OF RECIPROCITY"

“PRINCIPLE OF RECIPROCITY”

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

© October 27, 2014

REFERENCE:

Excerpt from second edition of “Time Out for Sanity!” (2014) in a chapter titled “The Refreshing Turf of the Outsider.”

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Problems become personal and well beyond comprehension when a person moves into adulthood with still the mind and disposition of the child with insatiable needs and wants. Careerism becomes the critical definer for some who lead double lives going along to get along at work bringing out the worst in them, while in private they lead secret lives that sometimes destroy them. 

This is the gravitational pull between exploitation and oppression where everything is on the table and everyone is fair game. Claude Levi-Strauss calls this pragmatically, “the principle of reciprocity.”

He asks us to imagine making an initial offer of a favor to a stranger. It becomes of special significance whether it takes the form of a few friendly words, the invitation to one’s home, or some helpful suggestion. It entails the risk of rejection of the offer itself, or the risk of rejection of the overture implied by failure to reciprocate and enter into a friendly relationship.

By taking this risk, an individual brings to an end the complete indifference between himself and the other person. It forces on the other a choice of two alternatives, as Levi-Strauss notes:

“From now on it must become a relationship either of cordiality or hostility.”

It will not remain neutral.

This is especially pertinent to me. It worked precisely as Levi-Strauss describes it here when I worked in South Africa.  By nature, I am a very private person, and the South African manager director was very gregarious and social. We worked closely together in forming a new chemical company composed of my American subsidiary, a British affiliate and a South African specialty chemical company.  He assumed the social aspect was an automatic extension of our working relationship. Complicating matters further, we were both young and with similar young families.

From the very beginning, he went out of his way to include my family in his, which entailed a very active social life, making my family essentially part of his. When I failed to reciprocate, the die was cast. Our relationship went from warm to cool to cold, becoming implicit adversaries for no other reason. He was by choice an insider, and loved it, while I was by choice an outsider who had never joined the club, which he could never fathom, and for this reason became quite paranoid. We were never able to bridge the gap.

An original mind is one thing. An independent mind is quite another. A private disposition is still another complication. An imitative mind cues on different sources for its satisfaction, as does a dependent socially oriented mind. 

Each of these mindsets has different needs and expresses them in different ways, always looking for reciprocation for satisfaction. 

An original mind uses other sources seeing old things in new ways. An independent mind believes in no contributing dependency.  To put this in a college student context, an independent mind would prefer to study alone.  In contrast, a dependent mind has little interest in originality or independence, restless when being alone, and therefore develops a nervous but carefree symbiotic relationship with others on the fly or on the serendipity of experience. 

A private disposition is often taken as arrogance, while a social disposition is commonly perceived as superficial and insincere.  “The principle of reciprocity” shows just how difficult it is for minds to meet and remain authentic.

When the pressure is great to conform to a social calculus, and the creative person is not of such a mind, creativity is likely to be buried in compliance, not cooperation.  Cooperation is always voluntary.  Still, there are frightfully clever imaginative sybarites ready to put their hooks into original thinkers for their own purposes.  Reciprocity is always at work, always something for something.

Appalling, yet comic, our culture encourages piggyback thinking, while professing to support originality. This is the subversive side of teamwork. We are well schooled in conformity, in being tentative, and circumspect looking for the ideas of others to latch on to. Reinforcing this, we join a new company and are told in orientation, “we are a family.”

As absurd as the idea of family, it is meant to show mutual respect, establish trust, and put aside differences in terms of the nuclear metaphor of love and togetherness in reciprocity harmony.

David Cooper has something to say about this in “Death of the Family“(1970):

“The appearance of love is subversive to any good social ordering of our lives. Far more than being statistically abnormal, love is dangerous; it might even spread through the aseptic shield that we get each other to erect around ourselves. What we are socially conditioned to need and expect is not love, but security. Security means the full and repeatedly reinforced affirmation of the family.”

Cooper goes on to point out that there is a certain gluing together of people based on the sense of one’s own incompleteness.  We seldom think of the work situation in these terms but it was true for me.

I once told my mentor and boss, Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth, my motivation to “behave” was not driven by fear of reprisal, but love and respect for him. It clearly made him feel self-conscious, even suspect.  When the affirmation of the family has a cold corporate design, it results in people seeing it as the basis of their security. We are not comfortable with the idea of love of work for itself much less passion separate from security. It speaks to Watts’ “wisdom of insecurity” because real security and non-alienated love are threatening to such a corporate structure. Only with unencumbered love of doing is it possible to get past security.

The corporate basis of security permeates all institutions including academia. Scholarship is often a measure of reinforcing the obvious social bias, a reactive construct that applauds convention and condemns constructions that disturb consensus perceptions.

The academic scholar goes on the briefest of limbs and therefore has little to lose in the matter, but much to protect. Criticism within this framework is a safe profession. It is made of one part reaction to the work of another, and one part walking in cadence to the drum roll of the majority. Such conforming scholarship is like an eating frenzy on the carcass of original thought.

From an early age, we hear the bromides, “nothing ventured nothing gained,” and “actions speak louder than words.” It is the con we play on ourselves that outsiders will have no part. They see ideas of original thinkers are torn to shreds while most fail to appreciate the irony.

We are not aware of this irony because we are so busy being busy. We are on a treadmill not unlike that of our pet gerbil and still see ourselves as superior beings going places, doing things, and making progress. We have the mental equipment to dig deep into our souls and find the source of our light, but for most of us that fun is left to the outsider.

Have you ever felt as if we are all on the same ship without a helmsman steering the course? The lack of original thought supports that impression. Every time “Freud” is mentioned it speaks to this deficiency. We can’t seem to ignore him, or get past him.

We echo our contempt for him. American sociologist Peter Blau (1918-2002) sees this as a desire to fit in, be one of the crowd, resonate with its sentiments, wave the same banner, and grunt with the same gusto, while having little sense of the collective nonsense of it all. Blau writes:

“Power that is exercised with moderation and confers ample benefits in return for submission elicits social approval that legitimates the authority of its command.”

That is why most churchgoers are docile, workers dependent, and citizens obliging. Our behavior resounds with the soundless cry: feed me, cloth me, give me access to exchanging bodily fluids, and my soul is yours.

Our debt to Einstein in science, Freud in psychiatry, Skinner and Adler in psychology, and others in their professions, is so staggering that I wonder if they have doomed us to our fate. It is as if we are on a ship of strangers with the only thing held in common is our estrangement.

If you wonder how Watts and Hoffer, and others like them, have avoided this fate, it is quite simple: they were never members of the passenger manifesto, more likely stowaways.

They might be on board for a time, legitimately, as entertaining curiosities but no more, as they are essentially invisible. Because of this they have escaped idolatry, of being placed on a pedestal only to be knocked off it at the insider’s pleasure. Outsiders never have to worry about pedestals.

In the worship of intellectual celebrity, there are the “ins” and “outs” and “no accounts.” Watts and Hoffer fall somewhere near the “no accounts.” It is permissible, even proper to cuss and discuss men of the status of Freud and Skinner, providing you belong. Celebrities are “in” and “out,” and then “in” again like the changing weather experienced in academia as in politics and as in the entertainment industry.

Watts and Hoffer are complete outsiders. Misfits can choose to rant and rave to their hearts’ content as few are paying attention.  Their ranting is a nuisance factor, but occasionally a welcomed diversion to the boring climate of intellectual “ins.”

Eric Sevareid (1912-1992), the commentator of television’s CBS News, discovered Hoffer in reading his book, “The True Believer” (1951). 

In the fall of 1967, CBS aired the interview called “Eric Hoffer: The Passionate State of Mind.” The program lasted an hour. Hoffer spoke passionately on a number of subjects, including the U. S. policy in Viet Nam, the importance of Israel, the failure of leadership in the Civil Rights Movement, and the uncanny character of President Lyndon Johnson. This was very controversial stuff in 1967.

Despite this, perhaps because of it, the nation so tired of a blanket of insincerity from every outlet of the media, Hoffer became a national curiosity, gruff, almost primordial in stature, with a thick German ascent, and clipped comments. Indeed, he was a breath of fresh air in the adolescent climate of spoiled bratomania that existed at the time with nobody in charge.

The nightly news depicted American young people’s latest angst, pranks, and protests ad nauseum. Hoffer played “grandpa America” to a fatigued and confused nation consoling it with his confidence that “all would work out in the end.”

He was a fantast but fantasies help when society is split down the middle with double-digit unemployment and double-digit inflation with a pathological mindset that clings to the cognitive dissonance that it has done nothing wrong. 

“Hoffer made millions feel better about their country,” Sevareid reflected to explain Hoffer’s television success. It also was obvious Americans had no intentions of changing, which anyone who had read “The True Believer” would clearly understand.

One of Hoffer’s intriguing metaphors was the railroad. He said American railroads, unlike European’s, never broke down because “Americans believe in preventive maintenance.” No sooner said then American tracks appeared faulty, unscheduled trains collided, rail bridges collapsed, and the efficiency metaphor proved to be quite leaky. 

[In December, 2013, we found this slide into the lackadaisical extended to an engineer operating a Metro-North Railroad train into New York City. He went into a curve going 82 mph which was nearly three times the speed allowed.  Four people were killed and seventy were injured. His defense?  According to his lawyer, he was suffering “highway hypnosis,” or in the sense of this essay, operating robotically on automatic pilot.] 

This collision with reality did not deter Hoffer's popularity as he was a curiosity. Readers and television viewers found his mass movement and crowd theories entertaining, and his confidence in America reassuring. They read his books that were brought out by an “in” publisher, Harper & Row.

His popularity was even among the normally cautious consumers of the printed word. There was something of an earthier Emerson to his epigrams. They spoke to these independent sleepy minds that wanted to feel better about their country. He dignified peripatetic readers and eclectic thinkers who were tired of the inclusion-exclusion metaphor. They needed to find some sense in the nonsense of the times. One thing his readers had in common despite the evidence to the contrary: they believed the myth that they were their own man.

While Freud and Skinner devotees have become institutionalized, Hoffer’s readers have remained floaters. Freud and Skinner have set anchor, confident of their place and space, while Hoffer sees no Nirvana around the bend of the river.

Hoffer passes the shoreline of late nineteenth and early twentieth century that is emboldened with Freud and Skinner markers.

Have these "in side" thinkers arrived? I believe they think they have, but what have they found? Hoffer makes no claim to originality, or to having found anything. He is just moving on the river. He has no universal “nature of man” theory, only a kinship with the giants of the past as student. He knows their ideas are like this river, always changing in profundity, sometimes comforting, often confounding, then contradicting, as they push against what is known to what is not, comfortable as he moves on as the quintessential common man.

When we drop anchor, and cry, “Eureka! I’ve found it,” we are in trouble. It would seem a navigational weakness common to thinkers today and our recent past. In “Fragments of a Philosophy,” I write:

“The amateur thinker can be defined as having the ability to articulate the world of ideas in broad terms comprehensible if not immediately applicable to the average man. He is a doer who thinks out of life. Compare this to the preference for technical language of the specialist. Specialization provides a place to hide from the masses in the cloistered abbey of omniscience.

Instead of substance, the average man is offered the dribble of inauthentic syntax to accommodate his vernacular. He is not the audience. He is a distraction. To console him he is given a few new words and terms that become popular without insight or understanding. In Iowa, we call that feeding slop to the pigs.”

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