AN EXCHANGE OF VIEWS

Content of Character in a World Gone off the Rails!

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

© May 10, 2015

Talents are best nurtured in solitude; character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), German poet, dramatist, philosopher

A READER WRITES:

Just about makes one cry, doesn’t it?

You are writing about business management.  I am up against the same kind of thing in political management. (Well, they don’t call it that, but it boils down to pretty much the same thing.)

My country, Canada, has now for years been deeply involved in Senate scandals.  After pretty well all of my life having given politicians and politics hardly a sideways glance, I began looking into our Senate. 

I found that right here in the 21st century we are saddled with a 19th century institution. Why could that situation endure so long? Because Senators’ positions, pensions, prestige and perks are all protected by our Constitution.  No competition here! 

We have when all seats are filled some 105 Senators who all just about have the same mindset.  And with all thinking along similar tracks, one might ask: why 105? One would suffice. The other 104 could simply be office staff.

Well, I could go on on this subject, but no need for that because I already did in my essay about the Senate, http://fleabyte.org/My-2-cents/senate.html

I know you are too busy to read it, but if you were to do so, you are likely to find you are on familiar territory.

Few Senators and Members of Parliament have responded in such terms as “Thank you for your valued contribution.”

Most recently our Minister of Democratic Reform did, more likely a staffer, devoted part of a sentence to “valuing” what I wrote and the rest of a two-page letter about how committed his government is to reforming the Senate. 

They had introduced eight bills to that effect, the last one shot down by our Supreme Court.  I had to tell the minister that it must have been very disappointing to have done so much work and it all having gone down the drain. 

Why not simply read my essay instead of ‘valuing’ it? All the kinds of problems our government encountered can easily be side-stepped.  Problem is: our Senators, MPs and ministers, even though they are much smarter than I am, come out of similar moulds, 19th-century-way-of-doing-things-in-politics-moulds. 

Always reacting instead of proacting.  And none daring to step out of line, sorry, “going against the grain.”  After all, it would be so much easier to call me a crackpot.

Well, I am inviting the lot to find any error of fact or of logic in my essay.  After all, there must be some.  But I doubt they are capable of finding any.

But what is the use of crying?

Henry

DR. FISHER RESPONDS

Dear Henry,

Yes, it could make you cry, and as you say, there is no point in doing so.  When push comes to shove, we can only nourish, protect and sustain our own individual character.  We cannot save the world when it has left the tracks.  The world improves one person at a time.

That said your thoughtful response is much appreciated.  It is also a bit overwhelming in its scope and problematic concerns. 

It has been my experience that lengthy detail is beyond the pale of most audiences, even those especially privy to such detail.  You reference Gustave le Bon and Karen Armstrong, and the French Revolution.  These writers and this event are, indeed, relevant to today. 

While you weave your concerns around such comments, people in government differ little I suspect with people in general.  People have the attention span of a gnat.  Even when comments from a knowledgeable, concerned citizen resonate, I suspect they will be judged on the basis of costs/benefits to those in power, which means they are likely to be dismissed, ignored, or dispatched.  

TOO MUCH TOO MANY TOO SOON!

I am the last man who should say too much given I go on and on only too frequently, but my sense is that your salient argument is buried in the detail. 

Three things I’ve learned about technocrats in the complex organization:

(1)  They are tacticians not strategist, programmed to focus on the part, never the whole.  They fail to acknowledge much less see the forest for the trees;

(2)  They are pleasers not challengers to authority or the status quo.  They interpret what those in charge think and fear and are at the ready to sustain those interests or appease or neutralize those forebodings; 

(3)  They are apologists for the brand and for people who carry the flag of the brand.

But before I continue, allow me a bit of a chuckle. 

What you encountered with the “valuing” comment for your effort from the Canadian government’s foil is par for the course.   

We who live in the world of ideas should note song writers Bob Dylan’s approach to influencing those asleep at the wheel. How does he do it?

He writes serious stuff in throwaway lyrics but with cogent hooks buried in the songs.  He has been doing this for fifty years.  His repertoire is so impressive that Simon & Schuster has published these lyrics in a book of 963 pages at an asking price of $299 (The Lyrics, Bob Dylan, 2015). 

The irony is that his fans repeat his lyrics unaware that these lyrics have in turn changed their lives.  Dylan is a philosopher without protocol, a change agent without a political platform, a cultural anomaly in a time with nobody in charge.

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The words of a writer seldom register.  It is the code that does. 

The code dances with the mischief already in the reader’s (or listener’s) head, but never with the overarching message the writer is endeavoring to communicate. 

Dylan knows this, and is comfortable with it.  He is dealing with his angst and if others can identify with his torment that is their problem, not his.  He is so well centered that if they place him on a pedestal it means nothing.   It is not about him; it is about them.  

If only those of us who write seriously could understand this, what a difference it would make!

Words and ideas rush out of our heads like volcanic ash, hot and heavy, consume our emotions, peak, then descend and ultimately cool to become the germinating soil of ideas for the next generation, or one in the distant future.  

That is why what you say is important, perhaps not today, but tomorrow.

I’ve paid dearly for getting all the extant published works of Gustav Le Bon (1841-1931), some only left in fragments, as publishers didn’t see fit to preserve his rambling but yet lucid ideas intact on such subjects a mass movements, the psychology of peoples and the popular mind.   

Within these reference codes, people respond to cues not unlike our beloved pet or circus animals.  This was the appeal of the “One Minute Manager” (1982). 

Writer Catherine Tritsch observed that the formula was precisely what Sea World used in training Shamu, the killer whale: “Shamu may be better trained than most U.S. workers.” (Successful Meetings, August 1983).

Sometimes I think we couldn’t survive as a society if not for being on automatic pilot most of the time.   

That said your reference to the Canadian government’s fixation with the nineteenth century registered with me. 

This is an indicator of a wider issue, the obsession with what is already known.  I call it plunging into the future looking through the rearview mirror, always surprised when we run into clearly visible objects up ahead.

Obviously, there are people in positions of influence who agree with your premise(s), but agreeing and putting that agreement into action are worlds apart. 

When in command and control roles, those in charge constantly run into themselves, then throw their minions into the fray to play apologists for them.  It would surprise me if this weren’t happening in the Canadian government, as it is happening everywhere else.  It is the minions who tell us they “value” our efforts, when clearly they don’t. 

PBS TELEVISION’S “WOLF HALL”

In recent weeks, I have been watching the Public Broadcasting System’s (PBS) television series “Wolf Hall,” which deals with the Court of King Henry VIII of England in the sixteenth century.  

Change the costumes and it could be a twenty-first century drama without changing the dialogue.   

Thomas Cromwell is the king’s right hand man playing very much the role of an (OD) psychologist commanding all that he surveys while being obsequious to a fault to his master, the king.  Why this reference?

The Twilight Zone was a television series created by Rod Serling, who constantly ran into the censors in the 1960s.  These were the paranoid years in America of the “Red Scare” (i.e., communism), when first amendment rights were summarily violated by the US Government, while the Supreme Court went along with the charade.  I was a big fan of this program during this most hysterical period. 

Serling got around these restrictions and got his message across by placing his dramas in the “twilight zone” without sacrificing the content or his character.  

I see “Wolf Hall” applying the same strategy.  Who could object to what happened five hundred years ago, right?

Alas, the more things go around they come around, as the French remind us. 

So, it is today with your Canadian government, as it is seemingly immersed in the equivalent of the oligarchic “Court of King Henry VIII.”  

Ideologies differ but people don’t. 

Your considerate essay reminds me of our oligarchic Western World of which your Canadian government is but a bland prototype to our own.

By a curious coincidence, “Wolf Hall” as it is now unfolding on television would not have had much appeal to the boomer, hippie or “X” generations, but a mock appeal to the Millenials.  Why?

Millennials cue on the things they understand and in a code that resonates with them.  They understand that the oligarchic one percent own and control everything and then there is the rest of us, yet we do nothing.  There are protests but no revolution (Le Bon also wrote on this).

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was such a protest movement that began on September 17, 2011, in Zuccotti Park in New York City's Wall Street financial district.  It received global attention and spawned the Occupy movement against social and economic inequality worldwide, but it has mainly fizzled because of a lack of coordinated leadership and support.  

Millennials learned in watching this that it is the difference between smoke and fire.

THE GENESIS OF OLIGARCHIC AUTHORITY

Since WWII, the management class has become the most viable contingent of a self-appointed elite.  Managers are employees like workers but from the beginning have acted as if owners, which created an aspiring propensity for climbing up the hierarchy.  

Let us call them “pyramid climbers.”  You have encountered an aspiring one with your “valuing” response.

The boomer generation as climbers were always vying for the next job, not having time to do the job paid to do.  Unabashed sycophants to power, be it corrupt or otherwise, they longed only for the next rung on the pyramid.  I worked for a few perhaps you have as well. 

Millennials are the latest common denominator in this sequential development, only they are not interested in pyramids or climbing.  Quite frankly, they are not interested in a lot.  Either they have seen the damage second hand, or they have been born into a family with the baggage, and are looking for a way out not knowing for sure what that might be.

They are content to be currently drifting certain they don’t want the world of their parents.  They don't see the situation as a matter of blood but more a matter of the content of their character. 

With no power, or no drive to attain power, they may be the greatest danger of all to oligarchic authority because the oligarchs have no idea how to spin this generation.  Back to “Wolf Hall.”

Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith’s son, was a Millennial of his time, while the Royal Court that King Henry VIII made peripheral to power, did their pyramid climbing building sand castles in the air.  Pyramid climbers today are returning to this fate of differentiation if you prefer.

Cromwell’s virtues were competence and cunning; those of the Royal Court were blood and privilege.  His involved hard work, self-discipline, domestic responsibility, kindness within limits, perspicacity to a fault, and stability above all else, avoiding being caught up in the intrigue.      

The Royal Court relished its position power, perks, privileges and inheritance not unlike “pyramid climbers” today. 

Just as management symbolically disdained the working population with its designated parking, isolated offices, bonuses, executive concessions, Cromwell's OD astutely wreaked of “middle class,” or nineteenth century code, “bourgeois orthodoxy.” 

Oligarchic authority and bourgeois orthodoxy go in sync apparently in Canadian government, as they do in the United States government and corporate society.  WWII nostalgia will just not dissipate.    

The content of character virtues have dissipated as has middle class values (see The Worker, Alone!).  They have been dismissed as boring lacking in the chutzpah of upward mobility and progress being instead identified with playing it “safe,” as if that were a sin.

We have moved beyond pyramid climbers to entrepreneurs, but is that the answer to the climber’s legacy for it seems to hang on and not leave our minds. 

But, Henry, we are not safe anymore.  

We are not in control.  We generate chaos and call it business as usual practices.  Governance in the public and private sector operates with infallible authority denying that everything we have (and are) can be whipped away from us at any moment. 

We are not at the pleasure of bullies and terrorists; we are at the pleasure of our protectors.    

The West is frozen in Vladimir Putin’s headlights unable to get out of the way much less move to safety.  He understands our terror and exploits it at will.  

Pusillanimity pretty well covers it.

The terror that grips us in the West is not our weakness but our extraordinary strength.

We have lost our ability to look out the window and see “what is,” but instead look in the mirror and see only our terror.      

Millennials seem to understand this without knowing.  

Perhaps this is because they refuse our conditioning.  Perhaps they have endured abusive parents, absent parents, self-indulgent parents, immature parents, hypocritical parents, parents chasing the buck while fleeing their mortality, parents looking for connections, always connections, for an easy score, always an easy score, and they want none of it.

It would seem we have progressed as a society in a mad dash away from parenting since WWII.  This retreat has been continuous from the Hippie Generation to the “Me” Generation to the “X” Generation, stopping with Millennials.

Is it any wonder Millennials are not interested in authority – they ignore it; not interested in culture – don't see the point of it; don’t feel victimized – don’t have time for it; and are not religious or irreligious – don’t feel the need?    

We are back to the “self-made” man (or woman) mold solely reliant on ourselves, tired of the rhetoric of parents, false promises of bosses and politicians and others who don’t have a scintilla of understanding of us.

But this “follow your dream” meritocracy that is implicit in this retreat can only go so far as explanation.  It always comes down to doing something, now! 

There is little chance that those in command & control positions, as one observer put it, are ready “to loosen the screws even one turn.”  We have to do it for them. 

The West is crumbling from the inside because it continues to stay the same, can’t seem to face the changes, which means it leaves the future up for grabs.  A Putin type was bound to step into the breach. 

We desperately need a socioeconomic Middle Class as the oligarchs once again come to bully Western society.  I am betting on the Millennials.

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