THE TOXIC NATURE OF ENVY! THE HOLOCAUST AND BEYOND!

 THE TOXIC NATURE OF ENVY!

THE HOLOCAUST AND BEYOND!

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

© December 26, 2014

PREAMBLE

A Christmas vacation while a student at the University of Iowa, it was common for me from Monday to Friday to spend part of my day at the Clinton County Public Library.

On one occasion I recall my mother asking me, concerned that I was studying too much, “Jimmy, do you find any of your college classmates at the librDuring ary?”

I answered, “Only my Jewish friends, mother.”

At the time, as you might suspect, I saw no significance in my comment.  Earlier, at the end of my junior year in high school, having been elected to attend Iowa's Hawkeye Boys State along with 739 other Iowa high school juniors from Iowa’s 99 counties, I found myself campaign manager of the Federalist Party, running for the office of the Secretary of State, and managing the campaign for governor of candidate Ralph Petersberger of Davenport, Iowa, whom I had just met. 

I was awed by my candidate as he was so knowledgeable in civics, politics and governance, while I was a complete novice in all these areas and close to totally ignorant.  He already envisioned himself changing the world.  I, on the other hand, although a good student, was primarily known as an athlete, was worried about being able to afford a college education.  I learned a great deal from Ralph Petersburger although he, too, was only a boy. 

Every night, I would be on the stage with the campaign manager for the Nationalist Party, as the two candidates for governor would speak.  My responsibility was to give something of a sales pitch for my candidate, and then introduce him to the assembled group.

Every night was one of living terror.  Although we would have sporting events and other recreational activities during the day, I felt I would die every night before getting on stage.  Ralph, on the other hand, thrived in this setting, failing to be intimidated by either his fellow students or a US Senator, US House of Representative, or the Governor of Iowa, one of whom each night was likely to be on stage with us. 

Remembering how I hugged the rostrum for dear life, I can imagine how I must have looked.  Despite this, I was elected Secretary of State, and, alas, I failed to succeed in getting Ralph Petersberger elected governor.  After Hawkeye Boys State, Ralph and I would never meet again, but I am confident he has done very well in life. 

When I returned from Hawkeye Boys State, dressing in the locker room for a track meet, a teammate went into a wild harangue shouting and cursing at me, “Fisher, you get everything!  Everything goes your way!”  Obviously, that was not true, but I met the charge in silence.  

It was my introduction to envy, which was not jealousy, but nonetheless equally toxic.

TOXIC ENVY BEHIND THE HOLOCAUST

Academics and historical revisionists have been known to ferret out provocative morsels for intellectual relevance and academic retention.  But if so, I think in the case of envy they may have a point.   See if you agree in this missive.

We are told by some that love makes the world go around, by others that it is power and money, and still others that it is jealousy and envy.  Whatever the person’s predilection, we know from experience that whatever it is it can be unsettling if not toxic.

Envy and jealousy are often treated as synonyms, which clearly they are not.  Envy concerns what you would like but don’t possess, whereas jealousy concerns what you have and do not want to lose (a loved one, job, reputation, possessions, etc.). 

Shakespeare's Othello is the archetype of jealousy.  Iago, his lieutenant, is envious of Othello’s power.  He crystallizes his envy by exploiting Othello’s morbid jealousy as opposed to normal jealousy.  Usually, the morbidly jealous person needs visual evidence to confirm his jealousy.  Iago provides this by planting the handkerchief of Othello’s wife, Desdemona, in Cassio’s room to confirm her adultery.  This discovery leads to Othello’s jealous rage and to the murder of his bride.     

While jealousy often leads to violence, usually this is not the case with envy. 

However, envy not jealousy led to the Holocaust according to Gotz Aly in “Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust” (2014).

Historian Aly attempts to make a case that economics not blatant hatred was behind Germany’s “Final Solution” for the Jews, claiming the Nazi’s “New Order” was designed to break the cycle of poverty, low economic productivity and rural overpopulation that afflicted Eastern Europe. 

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, no matter the wild economic swings in Europe, Jews were always the ethnic group left standing when the music stopped in Germany’s escalating game of demographic musical chairs.

Aly argues that rather than an ideological vision from the beginning, political and economic decisions of the Nazis were based on concerns for the welfare of Germans that resulted in terrorizing, enslaving and exterminating enemy groups, which were largely designated to be Jewish.

Historical revisionists downplay Nazi ideology and anti-Semitism in particular as mere propaganda and rhetoric.  Instead, they attribute causation to such factors as Nazi “rational” or “logical” calculations about material and demographic factors, in other words, “things” rather than people as persons.

[Before the reader becomes aghast at this description, economic holocaust has been going on in the United States for decades wiping people out of their jobs and security by hostile takeovers of companies in the interest of the ghost of capitalism.]

In this Information Age in which zeros and ones dominate, and cipher management is often the prescription, self-proclaimed apolitical technocrats downplay the significance of underemployment, unemployment, or existential schizophrenia by pointing out that the Dow Jones Industrial Index has broken through the ceiling of 18,000, but for whom?

What the reader is asked to consider in this commentary is what went on in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945.  

Was the “Final Solution” done with a modicum of complicity and tacit approval of the German rank and file, or not?  Historian Aly suggests that it was done with the full knowledge of the educated elite of German society, and that the scapegoat for all the blame and shame was saddled with distant aliens and fanatic ideologues.    

ENVY, THE CRUX OF THE MATTER

Aly anchors his thesis in the incremental process of Jewish emancipation during the fragmented years of Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.  This was initiated by German elites, but opposed by much of the population.  It literally transformed Jewish life.

Armed with a culture of education and freed from past restrictions, Jews quickly seized the economic opportunities offered by the window of increasing modernization, urbanization, and industrialization.  Meanwhile, most Germans, educationally unprepared to take advantage of this windfall, tied nostalgically to traditional ways, were reluctant even resentful to take up new occupations or embrace new challenges. 

Consequently, spectacular Jewish advances continued unabated contrasted to the lethargy, resentment and disorientation of most Germans.  This produced an envy of Jewish wealth, power, success and influence that couldn’t be cut with a metaphorical saw, along with an inferiority complex vis-à-vis Jewish competence, confidence and competition. 

This set of factors produced an insecure national identity that seeded the future Nazi combination of anti-Semitism and distrust of liberal causes or liberating policies.

Aly says that the “Revolution of 1848” famously called “Germany’s turning point” that didn’t turn.  “Boom and bust” followed Germany’s unification in 1871, which resulted in an intensifying of social tension aggravated by the already existing dynamic of Jewish betterment and Gentile envy. 

The author claims this was ripe for anti-Semitic agitation with the “Jewish Question” being seen behind all of Germany’s modern social and economic ills or the German society’s“ social question.” 

The Germany “boom” of the 1920s was followed by the “bust” of 1929 (The Great Depression) with Hitler able to combine the boom celebration and the bust humiliation into ethnic unity and the national recovery anthem of “the Aryan Race ascending,” transcending class, religion and region into a common “Aryan population.”

To achieve this remarkable transformation, Hitler had to manage thought to make it psychologically attractive.  This required the development of a race theory to conceal the embarrassment of Germans who envied Jews but were ashamed to admit it.

For those suffering a deep inferiority complex about Jews and their accomplishments, race theory inverted success into failure, turning Jewish accomplishments into evidence of vice and corruption.   

For those troubled by the large difference between Jews they knew and the Nazi stereotype, race theory allowed individual experience to be ignored.

Race theory turned Jewish persecution and murder into self-defense. 

Race theory disguised hatred of Jews into insight and made one’s own shortcomings seem like virtues in comparison.

It also provided justification for acts of legal discrimination against Jews, allowing Germans to delegate their own aggression, born of feelings of inferiority to their state.

With a blanket of passivity expressed in anti-Semitism, it gave the German government the latitude it needed to press forward with its murderous campaigns.

This work by Gotz Aly suggests that envy was the chief motive behind Germany’s anti-Semitism.  In the subtitle of this missive, “The Holocaust and Beyond” is meant to give the reader pause when judging Germany and Germans too harshly, or, indeed, anyone.

We as individuals and as a nation harbor envy in our hearts, and can be found to play this rationalism game of turning the assets of those we envy into liabilities, reducing their accomplishments to mere connections, their obvious competence to a shield for what they are hiding, and the game goes on. 

The nature of hate crimes have envy in common, illustrating more of what the hater lacks than what the hater hates.  Not only Jews but people of accomplishment of all endeavors are likely to be the subject of schadenfreude, as a way to compensate for a closeted sense of inferiority or inferiority complex. 

It is why I have never liked small talk.  As soon as a husband or wife belittles a mate, sibling, kin, friend, coworker, someone of an ethnic group, or personal orientation who is not present, I wish to have no more to do with them, hold them forever in low regard and avoid them if I can.

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WHEN THE PEOPLE ARE READY, THE LEADER WILL ARRIVE! POPE FRANCIS I CHRISTMAS MESSAGE TO THE ROMAN CURIA, 2014!

WHEN THE PEOPLE ARE READY, THE LEADER WILL ARRIVE!

POPE FRANCIS I CHRISTMAS MESSAGE TO THE ROMAN CURIA, 2014!

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

© December 23, 2014

The world is abuzz this Christmas Season for the startling Christmas message of Pope Francis I of the Roman Catholic Church.  Actually, it should be no surprise as Pope Francis is a Jesuit.

Jesuits through the centuries have not been known to follow the stultifying bureaucratic code of decorum either of the Roman Catholic Church or of society in general, especially when the mission of the church appeared to be compromised, or, indeed, lost on political and personal self-aggrandizement as Pope Francis sees the Roman Curia, the body politic of church governance reporting directly to him, which seems to have misplaced its moral compass. 

Pope Francis makes it clear that he is more concerned with moral psychology and ethical practices than political advantage in the short term.  Unlike previous popes, his Christmas message was not about the church agenda for the coming year.  Nor was it a tutorial on weighty lessons about how to think, but rather about what to think, and what to value.  

He limited his Christmas message to the bloated bureaucracy of the Roman Curia, its hubris, arrogance and bad faith, but he could just as well have been speaking to us all about the conduct of our lives and business interests.  He was leading by thinking inside and outside the box simultaneously.     

The Roman Curia is like the President of the United States, his Cabinet and direct reports, or an American CEO’s inner circle of obliging confederates and his equally obliging Board of Directors.  The nature of these established bureaucracies is to exercise power without apology, a derivative status rather than an earned one. 

Weak popes, weak presidents and weak CEO’s have produced the world that we live in today, a world often not engaged in real challenges, often ambivalent, out-of-touch with pressing issues, taking cover as apologists after disturbances, tragedies or catastrophes occur.  

This is a situation I have identified in my writing as leaderless leadership.   Pope Francis is not of this ilk

Jesuits, in the tradition of founder Ignatius Loyola, are “Soldiers of Christ,” showing little inclination to accept the status quo when it is the problem, or to sit idly by as power is corrupted without redress.   They bite the bullet and take a stand, popular or not.

For Jesuits the mission is the message.  

In the Roman Catholic Church’s two thousand year history, now having its first Jesuit as pope, it is finding out what that means in a pragmatic sense.   

The New York Times has published Pope Francis I’s complete remarks in today’s newspaper and on-line.  Suffice it here to highlight some of these remarks directed to the Roman Curia:

Pope Francis finds the Roman Curia feeling it is “immortal,” that it is beyond human taint or capacity to challenge its ubiquitous authority.  

In that sense, it fails to practice self-criticism, does not keep up to date with the sources of internal stress or accelerating external demands, and finds no need for self-improvement or self-development, feeling it has “arrived” and that is that!  

In a word, the Roman Curia is an infirm body loaded with debilitating social psychological disease.

Moreover, the pontiff informs us that the Roman Curia suffers from “spiritual Alzheimer’s disease.”  

This is demonstrated by declining spiritual faculties, which causes severe spiritual collateral damage to the people, disadvantaged in their quest for spiritual contentment and enlightenment.  

What makes it worse is that these people are programmed to cling to abstract or imagined views that results in a faulty spiritual dependency that brings little comfort to their souls.

The pope, crafting his message in philosophical terms, sees this disease of the Roman Curia resembling “existential schizophrenia,” or the dilution of a double life of hypocrisy on the one hand, and mediocrity on the other.

This promotes spiritual emptiness, the pope says, "which an assortment of academic titles cannot fill.”   

The Roman Curia is depicted here as being more interested in making an impression with its academic credentials than a difference with its performance.  This description has a lot in common with professionals everywhere today.  Moreover, in this context, the Roman Curia appears as if “Hollow Men” in T. S. Eliot's poem.

The pope reserved his greatest criticism for schadenfreude, which is displayed in the delight in other people’s troubles, better known as gossip.  

The sin of gossip is likened by the pope to “Satanic Gossip.”  

To show how emphatic he is on this propensity, he calls gossip “cold-blooded murder of other people’s reputations, the disease of cowards, who do not have the courage to speak up front.”

Since I write a great deal about these things in my books consistent with the message of His Holiness, I wish I had the courage to send him one of my books, but I don't.  Alas, I, too, am a coward!   

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THE WINTER OF MY SEASONS

THE WINTER OF MY SEASONS

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

© December 23, 2014

In this Christmas Season, thoughts turn to mistletoe and merriment, blessings and promises, thankfulness and thanksgiving, and right that they should, but for an aging peripatetic philosopher who is in the winter of his seasons, who is trained to see beyond seeing, it is less a utopian and more a dystopian landscape for much of the world.

Christmas 2014 sees a world in which nearly 150 Afghan children are slaughtered in school for pursuing a Western education, killed by the Taliban; a world in which four children are beheaded by ISSI terrorists for failure to accept conversion to Islam; a world in which two police officers of the New York City Police Department are assassinated sitting in their patrol car by a disturbed African American, who no doubt is also a media junkie listening to all the talking heads fueling the flames of discord and dissent for ratings over the shooting deaths of a black youth in Ferguson, Missouri by a white police officer and the choking death of a black man in New York City by another white police officer, both deaths tragic but little gained by sensationalizing these incidents. 

In Yevgeny Zamyatin’s cutting edge 1924 dystopian novel, “We,” which was the inspiration for George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four” (1949) prophetic novel of the same genre, Zamyatin has the protagonist Billy Pilgrim of the story exclaim,

“I’m like a machine being run over its RPM limit: The bearings are overheating – minute longer, and the metal is going to melt and start dripping and that’ll be the end of everything.  I need a quick splash of cold water, logic.  I pour it on in buckets, but the logic hisses on the hot bearings and dissipates in the air as a fleeting white mist.”

This metaphorical description appears to describe our world this Christmas, 2014, a world in the midst of a global nervous breakdown, a world I thought of as I flew to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and then drove to Waterloo, Iowa with my wife, Beautiful Betty, to attend the graduation of our grandson, Taylor Michael Fisher at the University of Northern Iowa In Cedar Falls, outside Waterloo.

It had been more than a half century since I was in the frigid cold of the north – 22 degrees Fahrenheit – or that I had seen the barren and naked fields of Iowa farms of a winter season that flanked the highway like frigid deserts.  

It was so surreal that I wondered if I, like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s novel, “Slaughterhouse Five” (1969), had been transported to another planet, as I felt aphoristic, even ad hoc, not unlike an out-of-body experience. 

The Vonnegut novel is based on the author's experience as a WWII German prisoner-of-war when the American and British firebombed Dresden, Germany into oblivion, a place that was not a war target, a bombing that was totally gratuitous.

This Dresden bombing was one of the darkest acts of the Allied Forces, executed in the waning days of WWII.  Vonnegut was saved from the carnage holed up in a Dresden slaughterhouse then being used as a prison.  The event traumatized the author for life, but released his creative verve that led to his productive literary career.

  

Taylor Michael Fisher was in a graduating class at the University of Northern Iowa of 1,200 classmates with approximately 10,000 friends and families of the graduates in attendance.  

The ceremony was handled with an efficiency that mimicked Frederick Winslow Taylor's “Principles of Scientific Management” (1911), which, incidentally, was most famous for its advocacy of “time and motion studies.”  

Zamyatin, who was familiar with the book, parodied its obsession with chronological time as well as its fixation on efficiency, while failing to understand the sterility of this mania.  That is so because it is the antithesis of effectiveness.

Consistent with that efficiency, the University of Northern Iowa’s graduation ceremony was as timely as a well-oiled machine.

Unfortunately, there were no inspiring speeches, no monumental moments to carry forward other than nostalgia for the event.  

Movement was precise, synchronous to the extreme, with students of the colleges of Information Technology, Business and Marketing, Social and Behavioral Sciences moving down the aisle on cue, to pass by the president, to hand him a symbolic confirmation slip of the student's status, to receive a mock diploma (the real one will be mailed later), then to swiftly move to stand in front of a mock backdrop of the university to have their photograph taken, then to quickly return to their seats.  

It was done with such speed that I failed to see my grandson as he swiftly passed by. 

The university president, along with the State of Iowa Provost, college presidents, student spokeswoman, and an assortment of dignitaries gave brief appropriate addresses with the entire program lasting about one and one half hours, efficiency, indeed. 

The university president concluded his address by saying he didn’t expect students to remember his words in thirty years.  I sense it will be closer to thirty minutes. 

To punctuate the sobriety of the ceremony, I waited for the graduates to toss their caps into the air, but only saw a couple, as my grandson said later, students didn't want to lose their caps. Collective restrain must be the millennial manner of Iowans today.

It gave me pause.  

I still remember my University of Iowa President Virgil Hancher’s commencement address to my class some sixty years ago.  Hancher, a handsome, quiet and modest man, a Rhodes Scholar and Phi Beta Kappa graduate, had a taste for the good sentence.  He also displayed no inclination to wax provincial, as current academics seem to prefer, or to register colloquial.  On the contrary, he moved the mind as well as the spirit and proved prophetic as he saw us entering a dangerous post World War Two future.  

It would seem the soul has been taken out of such ceremonies in this mechanistic age of impersonal electronics. 

That said it is clear that this Iowa assembly – as I suspect the majority in attendance were native Iowans – are healthy, wealthy and, yes, I would say wise, as they are friendly, hospitable, down-to-earth, gracious, mannerly, with no display of false modesty or the assumption of superiority.  

Iowans just are!  In that sense, I love the lot of them, although having been so long away from Iowa acculturation, I also felt somewhat foreign to them in manner of speech, disposition, perspective and orientation, but yet consistent with them in terms of values. 

What I remember from my days as a youth growing up in Iowa is how pretty the girls were, so different than I would see them on my travels about the United States and globe. They had a freshness like a virgin spring that made my heart sing.  They still have that fresh appeal, as I see them working at McDonald’s, at our hotel, in the shops, as well as on this college campus.  But now they look much like young people everywhere, young people in New York City, St. Petersburg, Russia, or Paris, France. 

That of course is thanks to television and now the electronic age.  Fortunately, I didn’t see prominent tattoos that readers know I hate, so if they had them they were hidden, but on the plane back to Tampa on an aisle seat across from me, an Iowa lady in her late sixties on holiday, who read during the whole 2 hours and 28 minutes of the flight, had ankle tattoos.  So, what do I know!

Readers are also familiar with my candor in these missives, and so I will close with reference to how difficult this trip was for my aging body.  As much trouble as I had with the cold weather, I had more trouble keeping up with my younger associates including Beautiful Betty.  It may surprise you, but I’ve never had that feeling before, and I know that it is an inevitable condition of an aging person.  That is why I titled this,“The Winter of My Seasons.”

Merry Christmas to you in the United States and Canada, and all about the globe, who keep in touch with me through my blog, and Happy New Year to us all, and may we have the blessings to prevail in a world that is more than a little mad at the moment. 

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WHY EMBRACING A PARADIGM SHIFT IS SO RARE!

WHY EMBRACING A PARADIGM SHIFT IS SO RARE!

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

© December 16, 2014 

REFERENCE:

This is another excerpt from THE WORKER, ALONE!  GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN.  The enthusiasm for these vignettes from the book is noted.

“The man who embraces a new paradigm at an early stage must often do so in defiance of the evidence provided by the problem solving.”  —Thomas S. Kuhn, American physicist, historian, and philosopher of science

There is a discernible contrast between the reality of the worker’s life today and its historical antecedence. The worker is at once a collection of atoms living its own conscious life “for itself,” and at the same time the unconscious agent of change. Since workers are not, in fact, free, but could not live without the conviction that they are, it is better that they understand what goes on as they do, than to seek to subvert such common sense beliefs.

“Happy ignorance” rules the head if not the heart of most workers. Even so, there is movement against the grain, now a slight tremor but rapidly building. The focus of this natural fault line is apparent — the worker, alone!

“Great men” do not move workers from their epicenter, but “important people” do appear when discontinuity leads to shock waves of catastrophe. These people are less important than they may suppose, but neither are they shadows. They embody the strengths and weaknesses, the passions and dreams, the nightmares and madness of their times. They step out of the darkness and display wisdom. They appear when rhetoric is reduced to rubble. Wisdom is not a matter of pedigree or credentials, not a matter of accumulated knowledge or experience, wisdom is a way of thinking creatively unencumbered with the known or with what has worked before.

Given this, the deciding factor when it comes to going against the grain takes courage.  Evidence of this courage was displayed by professional baseball player, Curtis Flood when he sued Major League Baseball for the right to collective bargain for himself.  When Flood came to Marvin Miller, Director of the Players Association of Major League Baseball, he could see the athlete’s mind was made up. “I told him,” recalls Miller, “that given the courts’ history of bias toward the owners and their monopoly, he didn’t have a chance in hell of winning.

“More important than that, I told him even if he won, he’d never get anything out of it—he’d never get a job in baseball again.”  Flood asked Miller if it would benefit other players. “I told him, yes, and those to come.”

Flood won, he was, as Miller predicted out of baseball, and professional athletes have been basking in Flood’s courage ever since.

To put “the worker, alone” in perspective, permit this brief excursion. The working man’s faith in ideas has controlled his lot far more than he might believe. Belief is the most powerful motivator known to man.  In the Western world, workers once had a deep commitment to an ancient faith, Roman Catholicism. That faith has eroded in the last 500 years, with some insisting workers have become amoral. Closer to the truth, workers have changed. They have adapted to stress and accelerating demands not always wisely perhaps, but inevitably. Change is never born in the void.

Religion for centuries played its part in the persistent pursuit of the spiritual truth treating secular truth as if the enemy as specialization became increasingly dominant, which required people to be educated and enlightened and to live in the “now” as opposed to a focus on the hereafter.

The Church argued it, alone, understood the “inner rhythms,” the silent march of things. Only those who understood this “truth” knew what could or could not be achieved, what should or should not be attempted. The “Doctors of the Church” believed they alone held the key to secular success as well as spiritual salvation.

Omniscience belonged to God alone, and they were His agents. Only by immersing ourselves in His Word dare we hope for wisdom.  Against this cultural inculcation, another truth emerged, empirical or practical wisdom. This is knowledge of the inevitable: of what, given our world of order, could not but happen; or conversely, of how things cannot be, or could not have been. The rare capacity for seeing this we call a “sense of reality.” This has been the domain of science and the scientist.

There is hostility against believers today in the United States, especially among young people, the so-called “millennials.” They see people of faith as judgmental, hypocritical, old-fashioned, or simply out of touch, according to social commentator David Brooks. Yet, between the doubters and the believers, Brook’s writes, “There is a silent majority who experience a faith that is attractively marked by combinations of fervor and doubt, clarity and confusion, empathy and demand.” Why should it be any different for faith? Is this not the age of ambivalence?

Spiritual and secular truth, truths of the heart and mind, spirit and reason, religion and science, have been warring with each other for centuries. Men of God insist the human intellect is but a feeble instrument when pitted against the power of divine forces; that rational explanations of human conduct seldom explain anything. Secular truths are inadequate if only because they ignore man’s “inner” experience. A high value is set on family life and on the superiority of the heart over the head, the moral over the intellectual. Notice as economics evolved to competition as opposed to cooperation, theology devolved to science, while the heart and the head no longer experienced comfort in the same body.

Men of science stand apart. They hold that only by patient empirical observation can reliable knowledge be obtained; that this knowledge, even then, is always inadequate and incomplete, but that it must be sought.  The solitary thinker draws a gloomy picture of the impotence of the human will against the rigid laws of the universe. Yet men of science display the same vanity of human passion as they attempt to uncover its mysteries, while failing to comprehend much less explain the bases of their irrational actions and feelings.

They aspire to reduce man to a manageable lot, to a condition of predictability, where passionless man can no longer be frustrated, humiliated or wounded. Men of science have a near metaphysical belief in logical detachment, whereas the religious have an equally metaphysical belief in supernatural detachment. Doctors of the church and men of science represent the spiritual and secular half of the same whole. Both long for a universal explanatory principle, composed of the bits and pieces of the furniture of the universe, which may be reduced to a single unifying design. From their respective vantage points, the quest for a unifying theory of the universe and a quest for the “Holy Grail” appear to be equally elusive.

They are men, like all working men, and therefore their personal and professional lives are inescapably a tangled web of unresolved issues, conflicts and savage battles between their gifts as thinkers and their passionate ideals; between what they are and what they purport to be. If you have any doubt how human men and women of science are, read Brenda Maddox’s “Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA” (2002) and “The Double Helix” (1968) by James Watson.

The humanness of scientists is illustrated by Mario Livio’s “Brilliant Blunders” (2014), where he traces the great scientific blunders of such leading lights as Charles Darwin, Lord Kelvin, Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle and Albert Einstein, all of whom are known for their great discoveries. Science consists of facts and theories, which are born in different ways. Facts are true or false, which are discovered through experimentation, whereas theories are free associations or fantiasies, creations of the human mind, intended to describe our understanding of nature, or in my case, human nature. Theories are tools and need not be precisely true in order to be useful. It is easy to argue against theories based upon one’s own experience, but it is much more difficult to argue against facts, which in science can be replicated and therefore corroborated.

At no time in history has there been such a gathering of scientists with such powers of insight — with the uncanny ability to probe and differentiate — as now, and yet, on balance, never have so many displayed such palpable ignorance! Society is lost because too often theories are treated as facts by scientists as well as laymen, which is unfortunate. Einstein concurs. He writes, “The more one chases after the quanta, the better they hide themselves.”

Could it be that man seeks too much, that he overestimates his capacities? If only the most gifted of men displayed a little humility and realized that conflict is natural and harmony artificial, and paradise on earth is not the absence of struggle but its requisite.

From the beginning of recorded history, workers have struggled to find truth, failing to realize truth, outside of nature, is relative. What is truth to you may not be truth to me. Religion has been at the forefront to carry workers on this journey. This has unwittingly devolved and turned intimacy into contractual matters to be litigated. David Brooks writes, “There must be something legalistic in the human makeup, because cold, rigid unambiguous, unparadoxical belief is common, especially considering how fervently the scriptures oppose it.”

Religion and science combine to be “apostles of despair.” Both speak with the same angry irony, both are deeply skeptical of each other’s powers. They have lost faith with faith.  Organized religions seem hardly religious struggling as it does to remain relevant, while somehow being thrown off stride by dynamic progressive change, when man, himself, has essentially not changed at all, and therefore needs what religion has always provided, which is sanctuary from contemporary madness.

Religious leaders appear pusillanimous warriors.  They fail to see that spiritual need (theology) and secular demand (science) are complementary forces. Einstein put it succinctly, “Science without religion is tame, religion without science is blind.” The clergy seem to be no more certain of their role in modern society than the average worker of his , and therefore the disconnect.  It would appear that the church is more interested in its survival than its mission.

When illiteracy was the norm in Europe through the first thousand years of the Christian era, magnificent cathedrals were built to capture the imagination of the faithful in compensation for pervasive illiteracy. The clergy reign supreme even over monarchs and princes.

With Gutenberg’s invention (15th century) of movable type in printing, followed by Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible, (16th century) literacy spread like a rash across Europe. The Bible was translated into indigenous languages, literacy flourished, and common cultures were born. Feudalism and the peasant class was eroding, while capitalism and a market economy was driving people off the land and into factories and crowded cities.

Nation states evolved as national cultures grew out of common languages and values. Kingdoms and empires became disenchanted with the temporal authority of the Church. Meanwhile, the Catholic collective conscience of feudalism was now threatened with the Protestant individualistic conscience of capitalism.

This led to breakaway sects such as the Puritans (17th century) who left their known European society to embrace the unknown in the New World in order to freely practice their faith. A new society was taking root on the American continent.

The American and French Revolution (late 18th century) were fought in quest of individual political freedom, and economic and social justice. America had a series of wars with Great Britain, but ultimately established a republic as a constitutional democracy and a new nation-state. The French went through a Reign of Terror following the French Revolution, and experienced great instability.

Stepping into that instability was Napoleon Bonaparte, declaring himself Emperor, placing the crown on his own head instead of leaving that ceremony, and all that it symbolized to the Supreme Pontiff of Holy Mother Church.

The Napoleonic Wars (early 19th century) followed until a confederacy of European nations defeated him at Waterloo in Belgium. Fifty years later, the American Civil War (late 19th century) led to the Emancipation Proclamation, liberating Negro slaves from bondage, and inaugurating the Industrial Revolution.  Factories, machines, steel mills, railroads and a plethora of inventions signaled a new day. It also marked the rise of the secular and decline of the spiritual. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche captured this sentiment with his statement, “God is dead!” God wasn’t dead. He just changed His uniform.

Nietzsche died (1900) in the dawn of the 20th century, the most violent century in the history of man with WWI, WWII, the atomic bombing of Japan, the annihilation of six million Jews, the Korean War, and a number of other wars across the globe.

The Austro-Hungarian and Persian empires were split up.  The reparations of the Versailles Peace Treaty after WWI were felt to be so extreme by the Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany that the treaty opened the door to Adolf Hitler and Nazis Germany, and WWII.

An explosion in technology followed WWII, including space exploration, and the boilerplate for the Information Age (21st century), which has become inadvertently an anxious age, an unconscious age, and an age seemingly in total retreat from the spiritual self. This has resulted in man’s self-estrangement, making him less the master of his fate and more its pawn.  Rather than find a new connection with these iterative changes, the Church has relegated itself to the role of ritualistic entertainer, which has left man sensing abandonment.

Religion as distraction has continued to foster the “should be” qualities worshippers’ desire. There is a certain irony to this, a manifest dishonesty and deception. It is an expedient design. It has not always been so.  Religion had vitality in the 16th century when a single cleric, Martin Luther, went against the grain of the dominant figure of the culture of the time, The Holy See of Rome, His Holiness, Pope Leo X, to post his 95 theses on the door of the Wittenberg chapel. This was unprecedented. Here a young cleric was putting his career and comfort in jeopardy for what he believed. He had little support, and was immediately labeled a heretic. Some called him a madman, pointing out the emotional character to his temperament.  He was all alone. He made no apology for his act as he believed his regeneration could only come from within, and that the source of that inner life was concealed in his immortal soul.

The enormity of this act is difficult to comprehend today.  Clearly, it was not motivated by self-interest, or to justify disobedience to the Holy See. It was an act of conscience and conviction, not deviance, an act with a complete willingness to accept the consequences. As an individual, he stepped outside the obedient rank and file and declared himself one with his Creator.

Scripture revealed to Luther a loving God, not the God he was programmed to worship. This loving God bestowed on sinful man the free gift of salvation through faith alone. The church’s liturgical dogma necessitating good works to attain salvation was revoked. Luther’s theology went against the grain of accepted Roman Catholic teaching, and cut to the core the hypocritical practice of selling indulgences.

Earning indulgences was proclaimed as a way to avoid Purgatory, and to go straight to heaven upon death. Indulgences were created originally to award believers for their good works.  But the affluent, who had little time or felt little inclination to do good works, bypassed the process by buying indulgences.

Indulgences were sold wholesale the way scalpers sell tickets to rock concerts today. The practice was ludicrous, but no one did anything.  The Roman Catholic Church was the most powerful force in Western Europe, indeed, in most of the civilized world. It condoned the practice of selling indulgences presenting a blind eye to the activity until one man, Martin Luther, demonstrated the courage to take on the entire Roman Catholic establishment, by going against the grain. 

With that single heroic act, Luther set the chain reaction which would release the worker from “The Dark Ages” of corporate dependency on Holy Mother Church, and plant the seeds for a growing individualism. Western man’s mindset and disposition was thus to undergo radical restructuring.

What is most remarkable about this is that Martin Luther was not a saint, not cast in the mold of the “great man,” not even an especially “learned man,” a man with many of the psycho-sexual flaws of modern man, a man who made the same foot prints as his contemporaries. He was neither a demigod nor a scoundrel, only a man of intense passion and focus. But he was a man of substance whereas shallowness ruled his day as it does ours.

Like workers today, Luther’s contemporaries immersed themselves in the medium of the mundane. Life was taken for granted with the many living in feudalistic dependence on the church, which was quite corrupt at the time, dictating the terms of that dependency.

Being so other-directed, the individual fails to see the absurdity of his dependence. His consciousness is so clearly interwoven with the flow of things that he cannot separate himself from them or their demands.

When workers are caged in standards of truth and falsehood, of reality and the ideal, of the good and the bad, of the central and the peripheral, of the subjective and objective, of the beautiful and the ugly, of movement and rest, of past, present and future, of one and the many, they are kin to the time of Martin Luther.

These are the basic presuppositions of man throughout the ages.  Martin Luther could not analyze his predicament from an external vantage point because with change there is only inner resolution. So, the question might be asked, was Luther more conscious of his times than his contemporaries as change agent?

My sense is that he was not, that is, until he visited Rome and saw the corruption first hand. The posting of his 95 theses was to my mind an intuitive act consistent with his temperament, a way of atoning for his raging distemper. The superficial dominates every age and masks the disturbing tremors few acknowledge unless or until they are shocked into awareness.

Wisdom abhors the superficial. It burrows through “the way things are.” Wisdom is not scientific, but a sensitivity to the circumstances of the times. It is felt!  Wisdom is more apt to be displayed by the mind of the peasant than the aristocrat, a mind that looks for simple truths and is not blindsided by the profound or allegiance to the status quo.

Neither the rules of science nor religion need necessarily apply, but rather the inescapable sense of justice. Martin Luther was in that sense, wise.  His protest led to the establishment of Protestantism and a new identity for the worker. The worker would come to see his relationship to himself, his Creator and to his world in more accountable terms. Holy Mother Church lost a dependent.

A CONVERSATION WITH STANLEY REEVES

A CONVERSATION WITH STANLEY REEVES

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

© December 15, 2014

REFERENCE:

This is an excerpt from the AFTERWORD of “The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain” (2015) in its second edition for TATE Publishing.  This is a representative segment of the conversation that appears in this book, which is due to be published in early 2015.

Many people have read this book in manuscript form, none more closely than my dear friend, the late octogenarian educator, Stanley Reeves of Clinton, Iowa. For Stanley, work was a labor of love, dedicated to the service of others. He brought his heart and insight to everything he touched to the end of his days.

As school principal, he kept abreast of the changing maturations in education and, as you will see, not always without some skepticism.  That is why I share with you his concerns expressed in a long letter to me after reading this book.

Stanley asks: One might assume that most workers want identity as well as financial reward for their work, but do most workers really want responsibility?

Workers as children shun the demands of responsibility. Such workers are non-responsible as opposed to irresponsible. They do what they are told and little more. Their greatest fear is to be exploited, so they exploit their employer, which is a punishing way of exploiting themselves. But mature adult workers, a breed apart and unhappily in short supply, are motivated by the challenges and demands of responsibility. It is the way they compute value and measure themselves.

Stanley sees contradiction in my suggestion that the HYPE (Harvard, Yale and Princeton Elitism) formula is not working. He agrees that Ivy League power brokers mainly represent the pomp and circumstance of the Establishment, the divine rights of insiders, and that HYPE has little motivation to modify the status quo, or to deal with society’s sick soul. Therefore, he takes me to task for my failure to place our eroding society on HYPE, choosing instead to place it on the backs of workers, themselves. Why?

HYPE is far less important, far less crucial to society’s redemption than HYPE, itself, would prefer to believe. HYPE is actually an aberration created by a passive society immersed in denial.

Obviously, HYPE has no real motivation to change conditions to a more optimum system, especially when it might prove threatening to its power. Why should it? As matters now stand, HYPE reaps the benefits of passivity. A disenfranchised workforce and indifferent citizenry denies itself the power it actually possesses.

Were workers to take charge of their destiny, the identity and recognition they so passionately desire would follow.  Modernity, or the processes of modern industrialism, has left workers running on empty. Materialistic society finds the glass half empty, not half full. Materialism’s emphasis on consumption at the expense of spiritual nourishment has depersonalized relationships and crushed workers under the burden of a corpulent bureaucracy.

The predicted “death of God,” or the “disenchantment of the world,” however, has not taken shape. The hunger remains for balance between secular and spiritual needs. Only workers, themselves, can restore this balance.

Over his long career in education, Stanley has seen the repeated quest for the perfect formula in education. Each panacea has run its course only to be replaced by a new contender. It intrigues him that I should see “information technology” as essentially a new panacea, an excuse to avoid our problems. He writes, “I found your concept especially interesting as all too often a professor writes a book and we all jump on his bandwagon. A few years later, we jump ship and adopt a new program. This ‘new program’ is not new at all, probably one that was dumped not that long ago.”

I confessed to Stanley that I am not anti-science. Nor am I pro-technology for technology’s sake. I am simply not awed by power brokers leveraging the newly discovered to fill their coffers.  My point here is that technology is not bad in itself, but that its promoters often use it as a ruse to gain control and influence, as well as economic advantage. Little thought is given to its long term impact on society. Science is the pursuit of knowledge, technology the pursuit of power. Technology, as wondrous as it is, cannot replace the spiritual needs of humanity. Man does not live by bread alone.

Stanley writes: “The segment on Silent Invasions is so true, but sadly we seldom think about the fact that our lives are invaded from every direction...government, TV, surveillance, noise of every kind.  I love your expression, ‘Love is the sinew missing from the muscle of today’s organization… love of work, life, friendship, and being. Lust, greed and pleasure are the void fillers for those afraid of love.’ This is sad but true.”

We are culturally conditioned from birth, programmed to value, believe and behave in a prescribed manner, a manner dictated by society. Conditioning is a powerful force with which few of us stop to wonder. It has enormous impact on our lives.

Generations subjected to a particular style of cultural inculcation establish behavioral patterns, patterns which stubbornly refuse to desist when they are no longer appropriate.  Why are there no Catholic priests who are women? Why no American popes? Why has the United States never had a woman as president? Alas, we have an African American president, who was not only elected in 2008, but also re-elected in 2012. Still, why so few great female philosophers? Why has work gotten a bad name?

Stanley’s conditioning was revealed when he took exception to my claim that “no matter where public confession is exhibited, it is suspect.” He sees the gross display of private lives on day-time television considerably more offensive than public confession in esteemed disclosure groups, such as Alcoholics Anonymous. I see them as both the same. They both rape the soul. He asks, “Why do you feel that way?”

When I was young, I thought electric shock therapy was barbaric; that frontal lobotomy surgery was uncivilized for the treating of the mentally ill. Yet, it was accepted as good, and I was told I was too young to understand otherwise. Earlier in our history, bloodletting was a prescribed medical procedure. It often hastened the departure of many souls from this life. To have suggested it was barbaric, then, would have met with a similar rebuke.

The sanctity of the human spirit is the last bastion of civilized existence. Too frequently, workers go along with violation of this sanctity for a “good,” which they are told is greater than the evil it causes. So, they are silent. Their good sense is buried in a shallow grave, giving the benefit of the doubt to those deemed “wiser,” but who are actually less attuned to the human spirit.  When we abuse our sanctity, it demeans the very nature of being human. There is nobility in private suffering, little grace in public confession.

In the chapter on “The Price of Innocence,” Stanley asks: Are you saying that as empowerment comes from within rather than from things, we tend not only to accept giving up much control but to demand it?

What is intriguing about this question is that Stanley found the buzz word “empowerment” disturbing. It has thrown him off course. That is the intention of buzz words, to cloud the issue, cover-up the complexities, and let whatever inference is made be unchallenged. It keeps the dialogue going, nothing changes, and Madison Avenue has another marketing coup.

You are correct, empowerment does not come from “things.”  It comes from within. Power can only be given. Once given, it is nigh impossible to get it back. The current buzz word, “empowerment,” is therefore totally misleading. Literature is replete with the issue of empowerment, as if this were a secret weapon from the Oracle of Delphi. Not so.

Management cannot “empower” workers. Only workers can empower themselves by grasping and using their own power. The only way one human being can have power over another human being is by one giving up power to the other.

“Empowerment” is one of those non-word words which periodically floats to the surface, like an oil slick, to pollute the cerebral cortex. No one can have power over another unless that person forfeits his power.  Democracy supports the myth that workers control their lives, when in fact they don’t. People of influence flatter workers into giving up their power on a voluntary basis. This creates dependency and suspends workers in adolescence. Power, or control of workers’ destiny is thus sacrificed for the promise of comfort, safety, security and harmony. Another word for “power” is freedom, and it is clear in these times of ubiquitous terrorists in the shadows of our lives that many are willing to sacrifice such freedom for the assurance of security and stability.

In totalitarian states, the same is done but on a more coercive scale. Far less consideration is given the mechanism of persuasion, which would have workers believe they control their destiny. Granted, there is a conspicuous difference in the ambience of these two political persuasions, while worker behavior is remarkably similar.

The similarity is demonstrated worldwide. In theory, if power is given up voluntarily, cooperation follows. If it is obtained through coercion, compliance follows. What behavior dominates the workplace worldwide? The evidence suggests that compliance prevails, which is cleverly masked to give the appearance of genuine cooperation.

Workers and managers everywhere proclaim they promote cooperation when, in fact, it is compliance. “Empowerment” remains a fictive machination which nobody buys, but everyone sells.

Technocrats feel they can bend and twist workers into the configurations desired that support the interests of technology.  Empowerment is but one stratagem. Across the globe, sophisticated empowerment programs support technocratic objectives.

They are not working. They cannot work. The stratagem is designed to fail because it plays recklessly with the worker’s spirit, as if that spirit were a microchip. It isn’t. Workers gave up much of their power early in the 20th century for the currency of comfort and security on the job. It created the working middle class. Up to The Great Depression of 1929, the “Robber Barons” of Rockefeller, Carnegie and Mellon, among others, took more and more away from workers until they were little more than working slaves.

The Union Movement came to the fore, and fought hard for workers all through the 1930s, and gained compensation and entitlement concessions, but alas, at the expense of control of work. It had been a difficult transition from an agrarian society to an industrial society, and it is proving equally difficult going from and industrial society to an information society.

Farm workers were first chased into factories by the shift to an industrial society, and then regimented to time cards and imprisoned in windowless barricades called “factories.” Not only did these farm workers surrender tractors and plows, but the freedom and control of what they did. As farmers, there was commitment to self-interests.

Now, their lives were committed to a new breed, management. Workers lost more than power. They misplaced their souls.  Their identity, dignity and purpose, once taken for granted, was now stranger to them.  Seventy-five years of cumulative cultural shock has made workers passive participants to their own destiny. They are wards of “the system,” no longer independent contractors. They can smell the fields as they drive to work, only to have the aroma killed by the stench of machine oil or the static hum of computers. 

With a casual flair, management talks about “giving power back to workers” by “empowering them.” This flippancy is like trying to put toothpaste back into the tube. Meanwhile, management itself has outlived its function and is disappearing from the workplace in droves. The Human Resources movement and its “scientific management” is obsolete. The worker is truly alone.

Stanley asks: How can we convince workers that in a number of areas we are no longer the best, when the government and media insist that we are?  This is not a problem of the government or media. Both are responsive, not creative organs of society. Workers give both of them far more credit than they deserve. The problem is the refusal of workers to embrace reality while they still have a choice. It appears they would rather deny despair, and surrender to a corrosive fatalism. Not until despair takes hold, and forces workers to attention will workers appreciate the fact that they are truly alone. Not until they hit bottom are they likely to challenge popular myths.

Maturity is a function of reality. Cognizance of reality ensures survival. When survival has multiple buffers, which make denial an alluring retreat, a sense of jeopardy is not experienced. Workers today live in a climate of denial, in the lap of luxury. They are only miserable, not yet despairing. They have little sense of danger, only inconvenience. The “other shoe” has not yet hit the pavement. 

Stanley asks: Is it the amount of production or quality which deserves more of our attention? 

It is heresy to suggest that these are not relevant considerations.  Increased production means more jobs. Better quality means a more stable market share. Still, production and quality camouflage the issue.  These are outcomes or effects, not causes. What is ignored, and what I feel needs more consideration, is the necessity for workers to develop more orderly minds, like the minds they once had when they worked on the land from sun up to sun down, and loved it. Their minds were in balance with a sense of equilibrium.

Workers today are underemployed because they are underwhelmed and underdeveloped. Tap this collective mind and the question of productivity and quality will be moot.  Workers are capable of incredible achievement if moved by their interests, or what they want to do. Focusing on production and/or quality exclusively are outcomes or things they have to do. Givens. Good quality and increased production are effects, not causes. The fusion of work is in the nuclear structure of the spirit of the workforce. Quality and production are the results of a spirited workforce built on trust with full utilization of its collective energies.

Stanley asks: Why isn’t technology doing what we hoped it would do for education? Are our goals wrong, our methods, or is it something else?

Technology cannot create spirit. It can kill spirit, and often does by the sheer magnitude of its conceit in minimizing the human factor. Spirit is the central core of work. Without it, work resembles a collection of mules turning a wheel and going nowhere.

Technology has limitation the same as everything else. In the end, the more technology seeks an answer to the mystery of the human spirit, the more it appears entangled in its own confusion.

Education is a spiritual adventure which is anchored in an intellectual experience. It is not a “thing,” but a process. The process is one of discovery. The human mind is seemingly limitless in its capacity for insight and foolishness. Tools, such as the computer, may assist in discovery as long as they remain tools and not as ends in themselves. Then they become toys, which is alright, too, as long as the distinction is clear. Where technology seems to be headed, at this moment, is as another ornament on the tree of knowledge. Nothing less. Nothing more.

What I see lacking in education is a philosophy of education. What appears instead is the expediency of design — a “new curriculum” for every contingency that surfaces. For me, the aim of education is to prepare the student first, to think, to become an able problem-solver within the context of life experience; second, the dual function to increase an awareness of the nobility of man’s achievements, and an appreciation of the fragile beauty of nature; and finally, to make prudent choices in the student’s best interest, which ultimately would prove beneficial to society.

This combination enhances the student’s grasp of reality and maintains his hold on his spiritual legacy. The combination also heightens his capacity to love and to give of himself, which makes him more human.  Education is not preparation for a job. That should come later when the student chooses a profession, craft or vocation. All the technical skill in the world, without this spiritual-intellectual foundation, leaves little satisfaction. Life is meant to be lived, experienced, and enjoyed to fulfillment. Pain, risk, discomfort, embarrassment, confusion, doubt and failure are but country roads taken to arrive at that destiny.

Stanley asks: You speak of the control that polling has over our government as well as ourselves. What can be done?

In other books, I write that the “please other” mentality is damaging to the soul. Such a mentality is too easily swayed to follow the Pied Piper of Polls.  When the focus is on other people’s expectations for us (on their agenda), there is little appreciation of what gives us satisfaction. Life is a constant battle to please, in which case the spirit always loses: “You’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t!”

Only by first “pleasing self ” may the spirit soar and behavior be guided by what we personally think, believe, expect and value, not because we are instructed to be so inclined, but because we have discovered it to be so.  It is further suggested that selflessness is a guise which wins societal approval, but which hides a hidden agenda. It is the guise of the victim, of the person who swims in the ocean of self-pity and never touches the shore.

On the other hand, the truly selfish person, who first understands and satisfies his basic needs, is more in a position to be generous and genuine. He is whole. Such a person values people who have an opinion, a stable of beliefs and a value system which supports choices.

What a person thinks is of more value to him than what voices of wisdom would have him think. He bases his behavior on firsthand experience, not second or third hand information. He takes success and failure in stride. He judges others on the basis of what he experiences in his relationship to them. Celebrity, which the “please other” mentality spawns, is of no consequence to him.  Therefore, polls are irrelevant.  He has a point of view, a philosophy of life, an approach to problem-solving. The choices he makes are his choices. He is a rare breed. 

So much of identity and recognition is tied to belonging.  Pollsters exploit this tendency. Many find comfort in thinking like the pollster’s sample. One day it will dawn on those so inclined that the only person they can please is themselves. Advancing that agenda is bound to displease others. No one can have it both ways. Meanwhile, society is gridlocked in a nervous dance to be all things to all people. Polling is symptomatic of this mania.

Stanley asks: Where are students going to learn the difference between rights and privileges, since all too many parents have abdicated this responsibility? Many parents don’t want schools to become involved in teaching values. So where does that leave us?

Forgive a personal aside. My teenage daughter once enjoyed the largest bedroom in our home, complete with her own television, personal telephone number, stereo, bathroom, as well as generous access to a family automobile. I say “once,” because she treated these privileges as rights.

Over time, as her behavior deteriorated, she was not grounded, but these privileges were reduced. First, she lost her large bedroom with adjoining bath. She had to find a place for most of her things in the attic as the new bedroom was quite small. In time her bedroom looked like a convent cell, with no phone, sparsely furnished. Plus, she no longer had the use of an automobile.

After a few months, as her behavior improved, these privileges were gradually restored, eventually she was even given the title to her own automobile. Since this experience, her behavior has been exemplary. She now knows the difference between “rights” and “privileges.” School, which was once a drag, is suddenly important to her. She is now a college graduate and a successful professional in her chosen field. And she has done it all on her own. No one else can take credit for her turnaround.