EXCERPT -- The Worker, Alone!

 BIOGRAPHICAL PERSPECTIVE

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

© May 30, 2015

Note: In the chapter, “Going Against the Grain” in The Worker, Alone, it was thought wise to include a speech given that literally changed my career, and is consistent with the theme of this book.

Just as going along to get along may be natural to most people, going against the grain is equally as inherent as breathing for others. 

This seems to have been the case with the Major League baseball player, Curtis Flood, as it was for the German Roman Catholic cleric, Martin Luther.  It was also true for this author.

Taking a stand is visceral.  It involves having a center and a moral compass that says the prevailing norms are wrong.  Such a position often defies reason and good sense as its costs are quickly apparent.

Consequently, going against the grain is not for everyone.  For those so predisposed, there is no other recourse.  They have to act to live with themselves.

While it may be self-defining, it is invariably at the expense of self-alienation from the herd.  Such ostracism may be as selective as social Darwinism.   

In 1958, I left the R&D laboratory as a chemist at Standard Brands, Inc., and joined Nalco Chemical Company as a chemical sales engineer, never having sold anything before.  Two weeks in the field after a month of training at the home office in Chicago, I was told I was not cut out for this kind of work.

I had offended the area manager by answering his question: What have you learned after traveling with me for two weeks?  I told him nothing as he never ask for an order, never listened to customers, never found out what they needed, and mainly wasted their time and ours socializing.

This resulted in my being given marginal accounts to service, and the right to call on competitors, but for only six weeks after which time I was to find other employment.

During that painful period, however, I sold the largest account of the district’s operation in years – taking it from a major competitor – by listening, asking what the customer needed, and was not getting, while working closely with engineering and operations as a partner, an advocate, not as an adversary.

Nalco would send 78 sales engineers (yes, I kept track) from other districts to work with me.  They also ask me to make presentations at various Nalco conclaves across the country to share my approach to selling technical systems to highly savvy prospects, as the word was out that Fisher doesn’t sell “technically”!  

Such opportunities gave me corporate exposure and a chance to capture my ideas on paper.  This led to rapid promotion and elevated me to executive status in the international division when barely thirty.

The momentous ride found me working in South America, Europe and finally facilitating the creation of a new company in South Africa.  It was there I hit a wall, that is, South Africa apartheid. 

This clashed with my values and a reality foreign to my cultural programming.   

At the top of my career, father of four young children, in my mid-thirties, I resigned from Nalco, resettled in Florida, wrote a book, did little else for two years but read books, play tennis, and attempt, however unsuccessfully, to write for a living.

When nearly broke, I went back to school full-time, year around, to earn a Ph.D. in industrial-organizational psychology, consulting on the side. 

Once I had my Ph.D., I joined one of my clients, Honeywell, Inc., as an organizational development (OD) psychologist.

Honeywell proved a repeat of the Nalco experience.  Having been a free-wheeling line executive, it was a new experience to be relegated to an “in house” staff function in human resources of a large facility (4,000 employees) on a scenic campus in sunny South Florida, and expected to echo the company line without variance, or else!

Not known to be a policy wonk, it came as no surprise that the human resource director suggested shortly after my settling in, “We don’t believe you’re cut out for this kind of work,” while my OD boss stated more accurately, “Find your role here in the next few weeks or you’ll be gone!” 

A clinical psychologist deals with an individual client and addresses problems in terms of behavior.  An OD psychologist deals with the organization as his client and addresses performance problems in terms of workers and managers in the workplace.   He exercises no bias towards either group, as he attempts to observe them unobtrusively in action.

My approach to OD was as eccentric as my methodology had been in selling.  I met with groups not as an expert or with an agenda, but with a desire to find out what got in the way of their productive efforts and what they, as a group, thought needed to be done.             

At first, I was distrusted, then challenged, then accepted as the real deal and a breath of fresh air.  For Honeywell to have gotten rid of me, then, it might have caused a protest, as rank and file workers, professionals and blue collars alike, were not used to being taken seriously, or to have their best interests taken to heart.

Honeywell groups asked me to give speeches to various technical and professional associations, while for management, I wrote monographs, presented papers and gave speeches to technical conferences, and made interventions based on worker consensus ideas, one of which was the creation of an “in house” technical education program to address systemic deficiencies. 

The director of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratories at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, read one of these publications, and invited me to Cambridge to work with CSDL's designing team for the ring laser gyros being manufactured at Honeywell Avionics facility in Clearwater, Florida.

So, it wasn’t unusual for the Department of Contracts Administration Services (DCAS) to approach me in 1984 to give the keynote speech at a department sponsored conference on Participative Management, when that theme was the flavor of the month across corporate America.

Having given "off site" seminars for this group before, I felt it necessary to make clear my reservations about "Participation Management," asking to be allowed to be critical of the value of this intervention.  The selective committee said in unison, “No problem!”  

That proved to be in error.  My speech became a major problem, for me, as I explain in this segment "Going Against the Grain."

This was 1984.  My manager, a very capable man understood OD, and granted me creative license to practice the discipline.  In the next segment (Typology of Leaderless Leadership), he might best be described as the “Happily in Harness.”  He loved his work, and was loyal to a fault to Honeywell, always at the ready to satisfy its demands whatever they might be.  Not surprisingly, he considered my speech a personal betrayal.

The United States in the 1980s experienced an artificial economic boom (e.g., Reagan “Star War” years) against a plethora of scandals (e.g., Savings & Loan), while corporate America never stumbled upon a fad it didn’t love as long as it was simple, inexpensive and didn’t disturb its power (e.g., Participative Management).

Panic was in the air, which I came to call, The Prison of Panic called “Now”!

America’s hard goods markets at home and abroad were fast disappearing, while, paradoxically, the American workforce had seemingly changed overnight to a professional class of workers, only management still treated them as if nothing had changed. 

During these years of panic, rather than step back, pause, take inventory and study the changing tide of events, it was "do anything, everything now!" 

The speech which follows was given in that climate.

For my punishment, I was placed on the equivalent of “house arrest,” banned from writing papers or giving speeches for 18-months.  But by something akin to serendipity, I emerged from this to be promoted in 1986 to Honeywell Europe’s management team in its Brussels, Belgium headquarters.

There I saw first-hand that corporate Europe was as messed up as corporate America.  Honeywell’s European national franchises had retrogressed to operating essentially as feudal fiefdoms after WWII with the managing directors as lords and masters of all that they surveyed. 

As passive and hierarchically inert as were American workers, European workers, country to country, were even more so.  It was a perfect situation for an OD study, which I quickly launched into with the idea of a subsequent book in mind (see Work Without Managers, 1991, 2nd edition, 2014)..

As Director of Human Resources Planning & Development, an OD position, it was soon apparent, however, that my new boss in Brussels had no idea what OD was or what it could do. 

Whereas in the States I had been given carte blanche to practice OD, he saw my role as that of a traditional technocrat with management as OD's client, failing to understand that OD assesses equally the efficacy of management as it does the workforce. 

This conflict in perspective didn’t make for a happy marriage.

His persona appears in the next segment as the “Winning Side Saddler,” or the constant pleaser but with a hidden agenda as opposed to “Happily in Harness” of my boss in the States who had no agenda at all other than that of his Honeywell.

So, in a not too subtle way, going against the grain expresses an intellectual perspective that the reader will find in this 1984 speech and subsequently conveyed thematically in this and other books and articles of mine in this genre. 

Title, time and place of speech:

PARTICIPATIVE MANAGEMENT: AN ADVERSARY POINT OF VIEW,

March 30, 1984,

Caribbean Gulf Resort Hotel,

Clearwater Beach, Florida.

EXCERPT -- The Worker, Alone!

 Toys of the Mind

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

© May 30, 2015

Note:

My international readers, reading the last segment on this subject, wondered if I had any more to say on the subject in this book.  Alas, not much more as this is not the focus of this offering. 

That said what is positive about these “Toys of the Mind” associated with computers is that people who otherwise would not be reading are, indeed, reading and being forced to express themselves in words.  Out of this will likely come a new kind of literature. 

EXCERPT – The Worker, Alone!  Going Against the Grain

“Toys of the Mind” 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.

These 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 a society reluctant to let loose of its past and face its present.

These toys are made by man’s mind, by man’s thought. This doesn’t make them any less real, but it does make them less sacrosanct.  They are now increasingly in the way. But workers have yet to develop a sense of humor about their toys, especially when they are no longer appropriate.

“Toys of the Mind” 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.

These toys may be concepts, special interests, or “things.” They could just as well be 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 or recreational diversions become obsessional, they cease being instrumental and become terminal as toys of escape from reality. Wealth or ambition are also but toys of the mind when they are viewed exclusively in a miser’s sense, and not in an other-directed sense, in what they can do for others.

The list 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 selective self-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 distractions.

EXCERPT -- The Worker, Alone!

Toys of the Mind

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

© May 29, 2015

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 not real.  They are fabrications.  But when the unreal is treated as real it becomes real in its consequences.

What is appealing about “toys of the mind” is that we can talk into our machines and listen to them talk back to us, or delete what appears on our mobiles with a sense of being in control.  

Moreover, our mobiles (iPhones, smartphones, etc.) act as an intuitive entity that listens to us, and while giving us this sense of power appears to understand us, and to know us.  

We contrive to believe this is true, and even a safe understanding, a privileged relationship tantamount to intimacy, when it is clear that is the most intrusive device ever invented by man.  

That said as denial is nearly as natural to us as breathing, we choose to see our operating systems as a manifestation of our consciousness.  

We have retreated into the surreal and yet surprised when our lives more resemble a science fiction tabloid.  

The great irony is that our creation, this unnatural hybrid of memory boards and short circuits assembled from the dissecting room of our electronic slaughterhouse has become more human than its human creator.  And yet, quite remarkably, we don’t seem to be concerned.

EXCERPT -- The Worker, Alone!

DEUS ex MACHINA

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

© May 27, 2015

As disturbing as the radicalism of the 1970s were in terms of abandoning our psychosexual mores, four decades later with the advent of the personal computer, we have essentially forsaken our conscious self and undergone an evolutionary change.

Computers, after all, are capable of simulating mental as well as physical activities.  Not least of which is anyone with an iPhone knows it has speech, reducing the boundaries between people and machines.  

Few are aware of this intrusion on intimacy, being constantly on and interacting with machines, indeed, interacting with each other by means of machines and their programs: i.e., computers, smartphones, social media platforms, and dating apps. 

We are endanger of losing our humanity of becoming indistinguishable from our gadgets.  Small wonder there are increasing anxieties and troubles in relationships between people.     

So many of us are “in love” with our devices, unable to put them down during dinner, in a college lecture class, during a church sermon or television drama, glued to the screens of all sizes and shapes, all colors and embroidery, endlessly distracted by electronic pings, vibrations, and buzzers. 

This is the latest incarnation of a people who no longer find solace in God or the Christian myth.  Machines are no longer interchangeable, but it is people who have been for it is the machine now that has all the gravitas and personality.  It is the machine that has become our god.

*     *     *

A Stroll Down Memory Lane!

AUTHOR GARRY WILLS, ARCHBISHOP FULTON J. SHEEN, SHRINE OF FATIMA, JOHN WAYNE and A STORY!

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

© May 26, 2014

A READER WRITES:

Greetings Jim,  

Very nice missive.  Do you read Garry Wills?  

In his latest he dismantles the papacy in large bites, chewing on notions and showing how power works.  This can be overlaid with any organization.  Sad that all of mankind's woes arise from power grabs.  We need to remember this as we reflect on current events.  

How history is written would be a great topic to tackle.  Always the view of Academics.  That is why I loved the books by Stephen Ambrose and young Douglas Brinkley.  

You write often, pondering the future loss of thinking skills.  I wonder about writing skills, both the physical action and skill: the spelling, grammar.  I read from the annals of Iowa, many of the Wisconsin journals from their state histories and other states.  Also the contents of the different Presidential Libraries provide fodder.  Also another is to read authors' books then read their biographies and scholarly papers.  

Rita

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Rita,

Do I read Garry Wills?  Indeed, I do.  Fourteen books and counting I have read of his, but I have read many more of his contributions to The New York Review for years.  He is a prolific author with very catholic tastes.

It was in the NYR that I first was introduced to Wills, as I am addicted to the essay, and he is an accomplished essay writer of the first ilk.  

I read Wills' Papal Sin (2000) when I was writing a book and decided on calling it "Corporate Sin" (2000), so that is where I got that title.  

So I can see you've made the same connection between the Papacy and other complex organizations.  

They all pretty much behave the same as the German economist and sociologist Max Weber alerted us a century ago.  

I've also read Stephen Ambrose, who wrote like he was talking to you, but my comments here are directly related to Garry Wills, alone.

*     *     *

Wills makes some of the charges you allude to in Papal Sin, but you say his "latest book," which is The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis (2015), which I have not read.  

A couple of years ago, Garry Wills was here in Tampa, promoting What Paul Meant.  I had read his What Jesus Meant, along with those other books.  An independent bookstore advertised in the Tampa Bay Times that it was to feature him for a book signing.  I called and asked if the author would sign copies of his other books if brought to the signing.  The owner said, "Yes."

After the author's brief lecture, when it was my turn at the book signing, Wills looked at my stack of his books, then looked at me, then inside several books -- to see if they had been read I suppose.  

Most books, and all of my London Reviews, New York Reviews, Foreign Affairs, and nearly every nonfiction book that I have read has been highlighted, but not Wills.  Instead, I turn the corner of the page over when a passage strikes my fancy.  I do the same for most novels, but I even highlight some them as well.  

BB says no one will want my books when I’m gone because of all this highlighting business, and I suppose she is right.  She doesn't like to read my books that have been highlighted.  She says it gets in her way.

In any case, I had a conversation with Wills.  I told him that I had met Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen in Portugal at the Shrine of Fatima.  

Wills made a rather remarkable response, "Were you surprised how short a man he was?"

It stopped me for a moment.  Sheen who wrote about 300 books in his lifetime, and I've read about a tenth of them, was another early hero of mine going back to my high school days.  "I thought he was a giant," I said, which kind of startled Wills. Then I told him a story.

THE SHRINE OF FATIMA

"It was a tour of sailors of the US Navy Sixth Fleet that brought us by accident to the Shrine of Fatima in Portugal the same time the Archbishop was there.  I kissed his ring, and told him that I had read several of his books.

"He looked at me puzzled, I thought even condescendingly, 'What books might they be?' he asked.

"I told him -- Peace of Soul, Lift Up Your Heart, Seven Words to the Cross ...

"He put his hand up, 'Yes, I see,' he said and then was ready to move on, but I asked if he would allow a picture of him with me, and he did

“I have the picture on a slide.  One of my shipmates said afterwards, ‘How did you feel about the way that priest talked to you?’

“True, it was somewhat condescending, but I explained.  Archbishop Sheen had every right to ask me what books of his I had read.  If I were the author, I'd have asked the same question (I was twenty-two and had not yet written anything).

“What I didn't tell my shipmate is that the priest was a theologian, read books in ancient Latin with facility, and was a scholar not only in theology but also epistemology, or the study of knowledge itself.   

“How could Archbishop Sheen know by looking at me that I was a college graduate with a Phi Beta Kappa key?  

"My shipmate knew and mockingly called me 'professor' for all the times he would be forced to listen to me pontificate my angst and wondering of an evening on the fantail of the USS Salem (CA-139) in the Mediterranean Sea as the sun went down.

“What the good archbishop saw was a ‘white hat’ or an enlisted man in the navy, and, unfortunately, associated the uniform with the man, instead of inquiring what I had learned from the books that I had read of his.

“Submissively, he dispensed with me with a wave of his hand, and ‘Yes, I see,’ when clearly he didn't.”  

Author Wills took this in and simply said, "Interesting," as his eyes told me I was dismissed, collecting my books in two bags and moving on.

*     *     *  

I didn’t mention to author Wills that I wrote books.  I didn’t think it was relevant.  Nor did I tell him that all these years later that I have tried to remember that particular episode with Archbishop Sheen.

Consequently, when people ask me about my writing, or write me about what they think about my writing, or post it on Amazon or elsewhere, I try to answer as I like to be answered when I ask a question of a writer.    

Fledgling authors or writers not yet well known often submit their works to me.  I respond to only about one-tenth of one percent of them; otherwise I would have no time to write myself.

When I do respond to their works, often critically, as I am likewise critical of my own work, it is clear they were looking for an endorsement, not an evaluation. Writers of such a mind I am unlikely to hear from again, which is sad.  

Anyone that goes to the trouble of taking the time, expanding the energy, and emotions to put her or his thoughts in writing back to an author is doing that author a great service whether the comments are positive or negative.  Making the effort pays that author a compliment. 

We that write and have the audacity to put our ideas, thoughts, and yes, biases out there for readers to consider should recognize that without such responses we would not grow, would not improve in our ability to express ourselves, and therefore owe those readers who go to that trouble to write a deep sense of gratitude.     

You can't know a book by its cover and you certainly can't know a person by his uniform or appearance, but an author cannot write without revealing himself.  

*     *     *

Author Garry Wills, during the signing of my stack, picked up a copy of his book John Wayne's America, and turned to the picture of John Wayne in the book resplendent in the man's youth, and said, "What do you think of this picture?" And before I could answer, he said, "I love this picture.  It seems to embody the man."

I waited for him to ask for my comment, but he kept signing my books, smiling, then thanking me for coming.  

Never a fan of John Wayne, I don't watch his films, and have had little respect for him as he made "war movies" during WWII instead of serving his country in the military as many of his fellow actors and actresses did.  

Many college graduates of my generation gave up two years or more of their young careers to be on active duty in the US Navy or some other branch of the U.S. Military, as I did and as I thought I should.  

Indeed, nearly every one of my generation did as well.  There was the United States Selective Service or draft still in place.  John Wayne chose not to serve, and to make movies instead.  

Wills is too good a writer to make John Wayne's America a hagiography, which is verified in this description: 

"He (John Wayne) embodies the American myth.  The archetypal American is a displaced person -- arrived from a rejected past, breaking into a glorious future, on the move, fearless himself, feared by others, a killer for cleansing the world of things that 'need killing,' loving but not bound down by love, rootless but carrying the center in himself, a gyroscopic direction-setter, a traveling norm."      

I wanted to tell Wills that although this described Wayne it also described an America that I hated, an America I loathed in my bones, and yet had to admit something of it I carry in my cultural DNA, and one of the reasons I think we Americans are our own worst enemy.

When I told BB later what I wanted to say about John Wayne to Garry Wills,  she rolled her eyes, "You're something else.  Give it a rest, Fisher, nobody cares!"

So, you can see your question generated a bit of a stroll down memory's lane for me.  Thank you, and thank you for your comments.

Jim.    

The Peripatetic Philosopher Writes!

A Letter from an Octogenarian to an Octogenarian – Why is that?

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

© May 24, 2015

Henry,

For all our angst over the way things are, they are rapidly changing.  Every institution we know is in a state of flux, rebirth or demise.  This has been going on while we remain focused on the here and now with our heads metaphorically stuck in the sand.  Why is that?

We are entering a new day!  Can’t anyone see that?  Old rules and old biases, even old thought processes are in the way.

Your focus on government while mine on Western culture has beguiled us both, and for reason.  Yet, certainly despite us, surely not because of us, both are changing.  The fact that this change is resisted is not news.

ISIS we like to think is a mirage with its violence and failure to operate within the Geneva Convention.  In Iraq, Ramadi was taken over this past week by ISIS with 200 men while 2,000 Iraqi military forces fled for their lives, leaving thousands of citizens of this great city to fend for themselves.  Why is that?

The United States, war weary in 2015, reminds one of the pusillanimity of the French when German tanks pushed into the Ardennes and along the Somme Valley on May 10, 1940 with little opposition, making WWII inevitable.  

When you have lived as long as we have, you don’t have to be a politician or a military expert, much less an economist or any other exulted discipline, to see that we as a society have a penchant for repeating the same mistakes.  It is as if no learning is possible to take place.  Why is that?

Here in my modest study I entertain myself by reading books, books written by people who are said to be in the know, people be they academics, politicians, pundits or naysayers.  They can lace words together with some eloquence, but never seeming to actually make a difference in the scheme of things.  They are like court jesters in our major institutions and might as well be wailing to the wind.  Why is that?

David Brooks, the conservative journalist of the New York Times, with an almost “gee whiz” engaging likeability, has a new book out, The Road to Character.  He claims virtue and kindness matter, but we are too self-centered, self-obsessed and selfish to notice. 

His declaration, I’m sure, resonates with many.  Who can be against virtue and kindness?  I’m confident neither of us can.  Brooks goes so far as to say we’re too caught up in self-actualization to notice, while, clearly, his book demonstrably is an expression of that pentacle in Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs.”  Why is that?

My view, and it is only my view, which I have shared with a parochial audience, is that we are not centered enough; that we have misplaced our moral compass and therefore our own personal guidance system, and are looking everywhere for it – perhaps expecting to find it in “The Road to Character,” but I doubt with success.  Why is that?

There is a serious flaw in the Christian-Judaic code, and that is that virtue and kindness are impossible without being selfless, centerless, and obliging to satisfying the needs of others before meeting our own.  Why is that?

I have a throwaway sentence in Being Your Own Best Friend (2015):

“To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as a person.”

The same applies to nations as the Romans found out when it went into the nation building business a couple of millenniums ago.  Yet, here we are with ISIS rampaging through the Middle East and Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and yes, Israel, waiting for America to spend treasury and blood to right the situation because America has spent treasury and blood to make these nation-states counter dependent.  Why is that?

The National Security Agency is under serious attack and may lose some or much of its funding, as well as its blank check on surveillance strategies, because it is now nearly fourteen (14) years since 9/11, and we have had no serious disruption equivalent to the downing of the Twin Towers on September 1, 2001 with the loss of nearly 3,000 lives. 

Yet, in a country, indeed, in a Western Society, geared only to crisis management strategies, should this safety net, this umbrella of security start to leak, and an American city be removed from existence, the most draconian measures ever imagined will be immediately put into place. 

Then the politicians, the academics, the pundits and the naysayers, like social termites coming out of their hovels, will be seen everywhere with accusations and answers, books and polemics with “I told you so, and you wouldn’t listen,” while freaks will be chanting “these are our last days.”  This scenario resembles very much the one I’ve uncovered with my research for the “Jesus Story.”  Why is that? 

While on that theme, there were no better spin doctors than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John of the New Testament.  There is no historical proof that Jesus said or did any of the things they alleged for him to have said or done.  The times then were as insane as ours, and no one personified that insanity with more efficacy than did the man named Saul, then Paul, then St. Paul. 

There is not a word of the Four Gospels that can be verified much less the authors as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John may be names of convenience.  Scholars simply do not know.  On the other hand, much of what Paul said is in some form of verification.  

Religion is now and has always been a political movement wrapped in a spiritual tunic.  Why is that?

ISIS justifies its revolution with the words of the Koran from the prophet Mohammad who was a military, political leader. 

Emperor Constantine of Rome made Christianity the state religion, a religion he never bothered to practice but used for political advantage.  Why is that?  Or better yet, why don’t we have a problem with that?

Man has been on this planet for tens of thousands of years, perhaps in the millions of years, yet religion as a spiritual/political system is relatively new, even for ancient faiths.  Are we to believe there was no organized religions or political systems before 3,000 years Before the Christian Era (BCE)?  Why is that?  

Buddhism has been around only since the sixth century BCE as has Confucianism.  Christianity came into being in the first century of Christian Era (CE), while Judaism claims to have existed for 1500 years BCE and Taoism since 2700 BCE.  Obviously, there are other ancient faiths, but none that have managed to survive so holistically until now.  Why is that?

Would it be too much of a stretch to suggest that organized religions and, indeed, political systems, given man has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, represent the equivalent of a day in the time of humans?

And given that all of these religions have had violent histories before they settled into respectability, even Buddhism and Taoism, less so Confucianism, which is more an ethic than a religion, we might better look at what caused them to turn from violence to sensibility.

We look at ISIS in terms of its violence – beheadings – and fail to process the fact that Christian history competes with that violence with its Inquisition, its Crusades, and other gratuitous wars in the name of the Christian faith over two millenniums. 

We selectively forget that ancient civilizations, grand civilizations, existed in Central and South America, and that after Columbus discovered America in 1492 C.E., these Great Civilizations were erased from the globe in the name of Christ as Europeans believed they were civilized and could act uncivilized with these peoples of other cultures and save them by destroying their cultures for their own good.  Why is that?

Henry, one of the privileges of being an old man is (1) nobody takes you seriously; (2) nobody expects you to be around much longer; and (3) therefore you can say and think what you like to your heart’s content.  And people will feel good about themselves by allowing you that privilege.  Why is that?

*     *     *

   

     

AN EXCHANGE ON SAINTHOOD, PONTIFFS AND "LEADERS"

 The Wonder of Wondering!

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

© May 20, 2015

A READER WRITES:

Jim,

I find your view of Paul fascinating.  He certainly was a lot of things but saint was not one of them.

He was like anyone else who thought he had the answer.  First he persecuted the Christians, and then he invented Christianity and pursued it with the same fervor.

In this he shares this sense of being with less exalted figures like Hitler, Napoleon, and Stalin.

These men all thought they knew the answer.  It appears one of the characteristics of humans who think they have found the answer is to try to convert others and many times when they don’t acquiesce force is the next option.

The Buddha is another example of a person who thought he had found the answer, and soon after his so called enlightenment sought to convince others to accept his answer.  The power structure of the time supported his efforts because it aided in the control of the population.

Klaus

DR. FISHER ANSWERS:

Klaus,

Your comments always stir my interest.  No, Paul was not a saint, but who is?  Reared strict Irish Roman Catholic, sainthood always meant a lot to me in my impressionistic years.

Pope Pius XII’s picture was on the wall of our modest home along with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  I would have a military audience with Pope Pius XII, along with other members of the US Sixth Fleet in 1957 in Rome only months before his death.  He passed by me in the regal chair held by four Swiss guards only inches from me.  I thought I would faint. 

Like books about Paul, I have read several books on or by the Pope Pius XII over the years, but have been most disturbed by those that have been written post-WWII.  For example, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (1999) by John Cornwell.

Cardinal Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, was Nuncio of Munich (Germany) for the Vatican and the pope (Pius XI) during Hitler’s rise to power after 1933, and subsequently, he himself rose to the position of the Supreme Pontiff in 1939 – when WWII commenced with the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 – and would remain pope until his death in 1958. 

Currently, Pope Francis I is considering Pope Pius XII for sainthood.

As devastating as Cornwell’s book is of Pius XII with reference to the Holocaust, more devastating to me is David Kertzer’s The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe (2015).

Pope Pius XI was totally enamored of Mussolini and thought him the answer to a stable state, defending his every act, and actually in secret collusion with him at the expense of the citizens of Italy. 

But the pontiff became disenchanted with Mussolini as his actions against Jews became increasingly draconian.

What Kertzer shows in this book is how human and brutal is the institutional governance of the Vatican, how secret and flawed, but most importantly of all, how Pope Pius XI’s Secretary of State, now Eugenio Pacelli, came to rule the roost.

The brilliant lawyer that would be the next pontiff (Pope Pius XII) maintains the autocratic organization control with its deep institution biases and tendentious authoritarian, and antidemocratic political views with little interference, that is, until Pope Pius XI comes to increasingly distance himself from Mussolini and the Duce’s increasingly anti-Semitic Nazism.

Pope Pius XI drafts encyclicals, which are meant to express the infallible authority of the pontiff, had come to understand that fascism was not just another conservative movement, but a dangerous pagan ideology deeply at odds with Christianity. 

The pontiff was mortified when Mussolini invited Hitler to Rome, calling Hitler “the greatest enemy that Christ and the Church have had in modern times.”  It was inconceivable to him “why Italy had to go and imitate Germany.”

Pacelli, who had appeased Hitler on many occasions as Nuncio of Munich, and apparently felt that Germany, and not the Allies, would win the war, found his influence on Pius XI waning. 

There was panic in the Vatican.  Pacelli and other power brokers, including the Roman Curia, were embarrassed when the pope told a group of Belgium Catholics: “Anti-Semitism is inadmissible.  Spiritually, we are all Semites.”

Paeelli saw that these remarks were expunged from the public record.  Later, near the pope’s death, learning of Mussolini’s anger with the pope, and knowing that the pontiff had written a final draft condemning anti-Semitism stating that fascism was inhuman and unchristian, Pacelli told the Vatican printing office to destroy all copies of the speech that had been printed. 

Still fearing that the text of the speech may have gotten out, the so-called secret encyclical against racism, Pacelli went to the limits of his authority to see that no one would ever know of Pope Pius XI’s change of heart, and desire to make matters right.

Now, Pope Francis I wants to declare Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, a saint.  Such is the business of sainthood of which I no longer believe.

As you know, I read and am still reading a number of books on Saul who became Paul who became St. Paul.  Should you read “Saint Saul: A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus” (2000) by Donald Harman Akenson, I think you would find support for your argument. 

I have a different view – am currently writing a piece where I discuss this in  A Letter from One Octogenarian to another Octogenarian --  finding the apotheosis to a cause rises out of the masses and settles on a symbol called a “leader” who epitomizes the masses discontent and longing, and not the other way around.   Therefore, I don’t see such “leaders” as converting, but representing the distillate of angst and unrest, and self-ignorance of the masses. 

Be well thoughtful man.

Jim

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EXCERPT --- The Worker, Alone!

A Conversation with Stanley

(PART THREE OF THREE PARTS)

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

© May 16, 2015

Stanley writes: “It isn’t likely a corporate board in New York City will have a personal interest in an individual in Clinton (Iowa) who works for the company. Doesn’t the worker need to be part of the decision-making process at the operating level? Shouldn’t he fight for that right as much as for more money and perks?”

Yes, yes, yes! But this takes education. It doesn’t happen by osmosis. Money is the magic elixir of a materialistic society. It is the alchemist’s gold. And gold is the standard by which everything is measured in a world of excess. After the basic needs of workers are met, however, money becomes the substitute for failed achievement, recognition, identity, purpose and influence.

Involving workers in the decision-making process is now critical to operations. There is no other alternative. Expediency demands such input. It also provides the recognition and identity that workers seek. Alas, poetic justice! So, why the problem?

Millions of words celebrate self-management work groups and workers as integral to the decision-making process, yet this connection fails to take hold. Why?

Workers and managers still do not trust each other. They see themselves as different, and so partisan hostility and self-interest continue to dominate the workplace. Logic never rules the heart, and the heart has a long memory. Time, patience and a supportive strategy are necessary to place the head and heart on the same body.

Stanley writes: Isn’t it important for management to show up where the real work takes place? Don’t they need evidence that they know what they are talking about? How many professors could step into a public school classroom and teach?

Yes, it is important. But that is not how the game has been played, until now. With adversity, there also comes good fortune. Management, as we know it, is anachronistic for reason. Managers as a profession for the past fifty years have been essentially expediters and paper pushers. The nostalgia of their role in World War II never was relinquished.

Nostalgia for that mythic time simply grew like a cancer, metastasizing through every fissure of the organization’s body until it was bloated with disease, and on every kind of support system, chief of which was the Federal Government’s Department of Defense.  I worked as an organizational development psychologist for a Department of Defense subcontractor.

For every ten workers, there was a supervisor, for every three supervisors, a manager, for every four managers, a director, for every five directors, a vice president, and so on. Workers were lost in the equation. All the perks and career ladders were set aside for this august group. Even engineers, who were critical to high tech success, remained outside the equation. When managers weren’t pushing papers, they were in meetings or traveling to meetings.

Meetings took up about seventy five percent of their time. While bloat was a corporate condition, purposeful meetings were suspect. This left little time for managers to manage “by walking around.” When managers did, they invariably got in the way of productive work.  Necessity is changing this. Non-doing of non-thing things is a luxury the workplace can no longer afford.

Position power is atavistic replaced by knowledge power which is primarily in the possession of the workers.  If managers don’t have the appropriate skills today, or cannot relate meaningfully to workers with such skills, they cannot manage successfully.

Managers are part of a team, not apart from workers, but integral to them in sharing common objectives. Previously, nearly everyone in the chain of command eventually rose to the level of incompetence. This is a luxury the organization can no longer afford.

How could it be otherwise?  Managers only had so much time and that time was dedicated to activity as an end in itself, not results. Moreover, they were prone to delegate what baffled them, and hold zealously to what they knew. This could only lead to chaos, which it often did, reducing managers to pawns of departmental manipulators.

Manipulation is still the predominant norm in most organizations, in the public as well as private sector. There is a crack in this mirror. The tens of thousands of middle managers now walking the streets without jobs, the scores of former CEOs whose phones no longer ring, and the college presidents and professors, who are being shredded, have much in common. They have gravitated to campaigners, always working for the next promotion with little time to deal with matters at hand. Now, they sit in the offices of headhunters writing resumes.

Stanley writes: Wouldn’t management and workers get along better if they trusted each other? Apparently, the motive of each is suspect. It is probably true that the larger the business, the truer that is.

Yes, managers and workers would get along much better if they trusted each other. Trust must be earned. Once earned, it must be supported with consistency. If it is not, trust once broken is close to irreparable. Trust is a fragile but powerful force in creating and maintaining organizational synergism. Nothing is impossible when there is a foundation of trust in the group. It can overcome adversity, failure, disappointment and even natural disaster. Trust involves risk. Risk involves struggle and the possibility of pain.

Someone has to take the first step, and mean it with his whole heart and soul, appreciating the vulnerability. Yet trust has little to do with organizational size. Once trust has been established, even a very large organization can literally erase competition.

Sam Walton did this by entering a saturated market with his Walmart store. He convinced workers and customers alike that he had their best interests at heart, then went on to prove it.  

K-Mart, a company in a similar business, broke its trust. It secretly devised a 20/40/60 rule: review all twenty year employees for possible separation; review the status of all employees over forty for possible downgrading or separation; and review all employees making $60,000 or more for possible downgrading or separation. The plan was exposed. That was only a few years ago. Recently, this chain announced the closing of more than one hundred stores and the furloughing of several thousand workers and managers.

As striking as this example, distrust proves the rule rather than the exception (e.g., General Motor’s ignition switch cover-up in 2014). This is because many organizations continue to have a cavalier attitude toward the trust issue. Alas, little learning seems to have taken place.

The chapter on “A Question of Control” generated this comment from Stanley: “I wish we could think of the controller as the leader. It is my belief that the majority of people will respond to good leadership. They resent being managed. . . controlled. 

You suggest a changed society may take a century. Are we sure enough of the right course? Can we remain firm of resolve for that long? Not trying doesn’t present a very pretty picture. It seems a given that to succeed managers and workers must share each step of the process. As to consultants, shouldn’t they be part of the process instead of outside it?”

With control, as with everything else, it starts with the individual. The individual is the controller, or the leader of himself, if you prefer, or of that which he controls. The two cannot be separated. The individual cannot depend on a “leader” to rescue him from chaos and disorder. It is his individual responsibility. A leader can only symbolize what is already established. There are no miracles. Should this be construed as demeaning the power of leadership, so be it. The quest for freedom, control and order rests with the worker, alone.

Looking at control in the macro sense, I recall an advertisement for a brand of brown sauce popular in England several years ago. The advertisement showed Daddy bringing a bottle of sauce to the table. On the label of the bottle was a picture of Daddy bringing a bottle of sauce to the table, and within that label was a label that showed daddy bringing a bottle of sauce to the table.

Control is a sequential product of order, and order comes from within, one person at a time. The multiple of this process leads to communal order.

Everything is connected. The macro is precisely the same as the micro, only many times more. A true leader knows this in his bones. The structure of the human cell mirrors the universe. We explore the micro to understand the macro.

A “changed society” is an evolutionary process, which starts with an idea. There is no ideal plan or strategy to the growth of an idea. It is a factor of climate, opportunity and time. An idea may undergo several mutations before maturity is reached and bear little resemblance to the initial idea. There is no “right or true” course, only movement from moment to moment.

Ideas have a growth period the same as every other living thing. It is a slow and tortuous growth with no clear path to the future. Ideas grow like cracks in the cement as weeds, wild flowers and grass. One day an idea experiences a transmutation from a puzzling perturbation into a clarifying insight that resonates with meaning to the times, which is not unlike a shoot bursting into bloom as a beautiful flower. Ideas are not separate but part of nature.

As for consultants, they are bystanders. Like multifaceted sensors, they derive their function from listening and observing. The answers are not with them, but are the filtered product of the organization’s collective mind, a mind that is often ignored until a consultant repeats its intrinsic wisdom. Consultants provide connection between organizational knowers and learners.

Consultants are symptomatic of a culture that doesn’t trust itself, a culture willing to pay for “a second opinion.” Companies insist on seeing the controller and the controlled as separate entities. Consultants are often the arbitrary intermediary between the controller and the controlled, which is artificial and therefore inauthentic. Were society not so ambiguous consultants might just fade away.

Stanley writes with regard to the chapter, “A Life Without A Cause”: Can’t change be a combination of outside forces as well as inside forces? Does it always have to be either… or? Wouldn’t it be desirable for some things to come true that workers expect to come true, not because they expect it, but because they are desirable?

Change is always a combination of inside and outside forces.  That is not the problem. The problem is what initiates the change process, stimulus from outside or motivation from inside? Chaos and order are part of the same whole. This dynamic created our universe.

Order starts with the individual deciding to change, to put his house in order, and therefore the change process is an internal commitment. Change is a reply to the demands of reality or outside forces.

What precipitates change is usually some disturbance, something that makes the individual or the company more alert.

Attentiveness is the precursor to change. The decision to act is a response to that stimulus — take a death in the family. That was the case with me.

My father died three days past his fiftieth birthday. His whole life was one of repeated labor to push the stone of Sisyphus up the hill, only to have it roll back downhill and crush him again and again. He never had his own agenda. He was afraid to. He had great physical courage, but little moral backbone. It was impossible for him to take a stand if his rights clashed with the rights of his “betters.” 

With his death, my insides changed almost immediately. A cautious, conservative, sensitive person launched an immediate pilgrimage to gamble on himself, to do what his lights would have him do, and to let the chips fall where they may.

Thus was born my motivation to plant seeds which others were too timid to plant, or who feared it might lose them friends and jeopardize their careers. I am not constrained by such considerations.

Nor am I concerned with whether these seeds reach fruition within my lifetime. I am a planter, not a harvester. My father’s death convinced me of that fact.

Each worker has to decide who and what he is. If he doesn’t, it will be decided for him. Desirable things come out of purposeful behavior. The purpose of life is to live it. How each of us might choose to live it is an expression of that purpose. The rest is academic.

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