Excerpt: THE WORKER, ALONE! Going Against the Grain!

Toys of the Mind?

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

© April 29, 2015

REFERENCE:

Excerpt from The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain (2015, expanded Second Edition of 1995 original).

THE CHALLENGE OF LEARNING!

Workers in my experience have inert minds, minds on automatic pilot. They learn by rote, or from a particular person, curriculum, or doctrine; from an exceptional teacher, coach or preacher, or from specific books. They fail, in the main, to learn from their own observations and actions; from their own unique set of life experiences.

The result is that many workers imitate the experience of others. They strive for identity and recognition through conformity, competition and copycatting.

They seem unwilling to struggle for identity. The only way true identity and recognition can be achieved is through self-discovery and experience, not by imitating the styles and behaviors of others.

The tremendous burden of attempting to always please others, both personally and professionally, and then to live up to their expectations, has made many workers’ minds extraordinarily dull.

After decades of turbulent discord within themselves, festering conflict with others, tiring accommodation, punishing doubt, plus the constant agony of imitation, many workers feel cut off from life, adrift and without anchor.

Through this maddening process of attempting to be like everyone else, many have become second or third-hand persons to themselves. They are always quoting somebody else, never mustering the courage to consider or voice an original thought or opinion. They check pollsters, as if heuristic box scores, to see if they are “thinking right,” terrified at the thought they might be outside the prevailing norm. Their consumer choices, dictated by a cadre of experts, compel them to support the “best” films, books, automobiles, neighborhoods, cities, diets, mates, exercises, stocks, ad infinitum. Taste is designed by a committee with the lowest common denominator in mind.

When workers are disappointed, they can blame the experts in which they placed their confidence, for the choices were never their own. This brings to the surface an elusive problem.

If the choices made are not considered the worker’s, it is not in the cards for them to learn from their mistakes. Instead, like the terminally immature, they can claim no responsibility for their behavior.  They were just doing what they were told. 

Identity and recognition thus become disingenuous, while their actions become clones of someone else’s agenda. Rented minds never act like home owners.

Alas, I suspect such minds pervade the climate of the home, job, school and community. A poverty of will and a concession to helplessness defines the identity of many such workers.

Life’s hard rule is that everyone is responsible for their own actions, and to learn from the consequences of those actions.  Everyone gets a report card on their performance every day of their life.

Workers can be male, female, dark or light, tall or short, fat or trim, young or old, American or Armenian, Indian or Indonesian, life’s flow is the same. Movement is similar. Every worker’s destiny, whatever it is, depends on observations in school, work, and play and in daily pursuits.

Discipline is not conformity. Discipline involves a mind alert to its own actions — a living mind. Conformity implies conflict between “what is” and “what should be.” Conforming to certain prevailing ideologies, social norms and societal “truths,” truths to which everyone supposedly subscribes without reflection, seeds conflict.

A discriminating mind cannot absorb what makes little sense. Such a mind must probe and weigh the merits of what is professed against what is experienced. With conflict, there is always friction and the dissipation of energy. Workers can be so absorbed in the conflict that they are not conscious of reality. The result is then confusion.

Each worker must put his own house in order, because no one else is going to do it for him.  A mind in disorder peers out at the world through an opaque window, unable to see the beauty and balance of nature. The window holds confusion in and beauty and the delight of other people out.

Most workers within my experience are consumed with the distractions of either toys or careers. For them, life is without beauty or order. It is a constant grind, day in and day out. “I work hard and play hard,” they proclaim, failing to realize the implicit absurdity in this boast. They have learned the art of moral evasion.

Yet beauty, not wealth or security, is a delight and it is free!

The spirit withdrawn into itself and out of sight, may not be completely destroyed, but it could go blind in that pervasive internal darkness.

What is valued is not always what is precious. As Shakespeare puts it: “To wilful men, the injuries that they themselves procure must be their schoolmaster’s.” Indeed!

A paternalistic society knows the value of toys, but not necessarily the essence of beauty. Give a child having a tantrum a complicated toy, and the child is absorbed, distracted from its anguish, quiet.  The child enjoys the mechanics of discovery and is focused, involved completely with the toy. All mischief dissolves.

Such a society gives workers the toys of technology, the toys of ideals and the toys of beliefs to absorb their discontent. Some toys are treated as sacred (religious doctrines, rites and rituals), others as profane (pop culture), still others as precedence (national holidays).

Tradition as toy assures the maintenance of the company pecking order. No one disputes the CEO.’s omnipotence. Other toys are status symbols: money, stately homes, expensive automobiles, socio-economic status, knowledge…

Workers come to venerate ideals, beliefs, policies, customs, norms and hierarchical relationships without reflection. “It is the way it has always been, so it must be right.” These come to be accepted as “truths,” to which the majority subscribe, when they are simply “toys of the mind.”

They are all inventions of thought and therefore flawed. Even so, some treat them as absolute truths, when there are no such things. There are no absolute truths, only a welter of contradictory truths embodied in the worker’s imaginary self. This imaginary self is likely to form his “character.” And character is but a mixed bag of relative truths which each worker may call his own.

Psychic toys are proliferating at an alarming rate. Still, they are seldom essential, more apt to be vain accumulations of gibberish and nonsense.  The potpourri of psychic toys a society is reluctant to “let go of” doesn’t make them less real, but it does make them more sacrosanct.

Psychic toys are now increasingly in the way. But workers have yet to develop a sense of humor about these toys, especially when they are no longer appropriate. 

Take smartphones for example; better yet take them away from young people and see the reaction.  These magic tools/toys have become gods to them.  So, to take them away is tantamount to messing with their religion.

Legitimate tools as toys have their purpose, and that purpose is mostly as distraction.  When workers are absorbed in toys, like a child, they are extraordinarily quiet and obedient to the demands of these toys.   

The toys may be concepts, special interests, or “things,” such as smartphones, cell phones, laptops, computers, technologies, automobiles, boats, houses, planes, athletics, hobbies, the worker’s own persona or profession.

Stated another way, when legitimate tools become obsessional recreational diversions, they cease being instrumentally valuable and become terminal values competing with love, duty, devotion, and intimacy; in other words, toys, or escape from reality.

Wealth or ambition are also toys of the mind when they are viewed exclusively in a miser’s sense, and not in an other-directed sense or what they can do for others. The list of toys of the mind is endless, but the results are always the same. The toys absorb and distract the worker from the chaos of “what is,” to the appeasing pleasure of denial and selective forgetting.

With effective distraction, there is the absence of self. There is no need to think, experience, problem solve or learn. For the moment, the worker is totally controllable. He differs little with the greyhound at the race track who chases the mechanical rabbit, or the rodent who wanders through the maze for the promised piece of cheese. The Holy Grail of this anxious age is the perfect toy to seduce the worker’s restless spirit into compliant behavior.

Should the reader think this is a recent challenge, Roman philosopher Seneca (4 B.C. - 65 A.D.) observed: “Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.” That is not likely with the constant subliminal bombardment of toys of distractions.