The Peripatetic Philosopher shares:

Genius Realized:

Getting First Published at Age 96

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

© July 31, 2015

REFERENCE:

This was first published on March 30, 2015.  It is to appear in a collection of essays in a book to be titled SELF-CONFIDENCE: The Illusive Key to Health and Happiness.  

“Genius is only the power of making continuous effort. The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it, so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it. How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience, would have achieved success. As the tide goes clear out, so it comes clear in.  In business, sometimes prospects may seem darkest when really they are on the turn. A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success. There is no defeat except from within; there is no failure except in no longer trying, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915), American pragmatic philosopher

IT IS NEVER TOO LATE!

Harry Louis Bernstein (May 30, 1910 – June 3, 2011) was a British-born American writer whose first published book, The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers (2007), dealt with his long suffering mother Ada's struggles to feed her six children; an abusive, alcoholic father, Yankel; the anti-Semitism Bernstein and his Jewish neighbors encountered growing up in a Cheshire mill town (Stockport, now part of Greater Manchester) in northwest England; the loss of Jews and Christians from the community in World War I; and the Romeo and Juliet-like romance experienced by his sister Lily and her Christian boyfriend.

The book was started when Bernstein was 93 and published in 2007, when he was 96. The loneliness he encountered following the death of his wife, Ruby, 91, in 2002, after 67 years of marriage, was the catalyst for Bernstein to begin work on his book.

His second book, The Dream, published in 2008, centered on his family’s move to the West Side of Chicago in 1922 when he was twelve.

In 2009, Bernstein published his third book, The Golden Willow, which chronicled his married life and later years. A fourth book, What Happened to Rose, was published posthumously in 2012.  He died four days past his 101^st birthday.

Before his retirement at age 62, Bernstein worked for various movie production companies, reading scripts and working as a magazine editor for trade magazines. He also wrote freelance articles for such publications as Popular Mechanics, Family Circle and Newsweek.

Bernstein lived in Brick Township, New Jersey.  He died at the age of 101, on June 3, 2011.

The Invisible Wall tells the story of his older sister doing the unthinkable.  She falls in love with a Christian boy.  But they are separated culturally by an “invisible wall” that divides the Jewish families on one side of the cobble stone street from the Christian families on the other. 

When the young Harry Bernstein discovers the secret affair quite by accident, he has to choose between the strict morals that he has been taught all his life, his loyalty to his religious and selfless mother, and what he knows is right in his own mind.

THE PATIENCE OF GENIUS

From Harry’s earliest recollections, as early as when he was four-years-old and started to read words on a page, he felt an urge to write.  Through grammar school and high school composition was his favorite subject.

As a young man out of high school, he attempted to publish, but received only rejection slips, but he persisted, finding work where he could but always wanting to be an author.  

He met his wife, Ruby, at a dance, and it was love at first sight.  He loved her to pieces and took a job reading movie scripts of authors’ books, but changed his focus from his writing obsession to enjoying her completely. 

They had two children, and a happy home, but he was put into a total funk when she died, and found the only way to fill his loneliness was writing, which he had always done throughout his life, publishing an article here and there, but never able to capture enough attention to make a living at it.

The Invisible Wall at first experienced a fate of which he was quite familiar – constant rejections.  

He attempted to write a novel after a short piece generated enough interest that an editor asked him to give the novel idea a try, which he did, but without success.

After Ruby died, he decided to go back to the beginnings of his life, nearly ninety years in the past, and found that he had a retentive memory of those early days as if they were only yesterday. 

Instead of being discouraged at the rejections The Invisible Wall generated, he admits in the afterward of this book that he’s never lacked confidence in himself or his ability to write.  In an amusing aside, he admits to being a rather cocky soul.

In any case, an editor from Random House called, and said she had read his manuscript and that Random House would like to publish it in a small printing.  He was so elated he couldn’t believe his good fortune.

Random House published the book, and the book reviews were unanimously positive, while The New York Times put his picture on the front page of the newspaper celebrating his being a published author for the first time at the age of 96.

Columnist from across the Western World called or visited him for interviews.  He was in demand on radio, television and in magazines.  He satisfied all these demands willingly and enthusiastically.

Other publishers wanted to publish his works.  So, at 96, he wrote a sequel to The Invisible Wall and followed it with another published during his lifetime, with one published posthumously. 

Were Elbert Hubbard alive, he would have joined the celebration as he believed with all his heart that genius was not rare, but common.  The problem, he argued, was that people pay too much attention to those that say “you’re wasting your time” or whatever, not listening enough to that inner voice that says, success is right around the corner!

The Peripatetic Philosopher Reports: ARE WE TRAPPED BETWEEN TWO WORLDS? James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 30, 2015

A READER REACTS:

I would take issue with your headline "We are not living in a religious age."

We may be in transition, but religion continues to play a prominent role in the lives of followers and non-followers alike.

Whether it is used as an excuse for infringing on the rights of others, or as a purpose for communities to join in support of the less fortunate, religion both unites and divides us. Just as it has for thousands of years.

For a long time religion had a monolithic quality. Heretics began to question and disprove much of the religion-based science that church dogma had forced on its constituency.

Martin Luther and King Henry VIII chose to ignore the center of power and do what was convenient. We bemoan the breakdown of society and attribute that to the dissolution of the nuclear family pointing to the ease with which parents can divorce and now don't even bother to marry. Thank you King Henry VIII.

This massive case of group think foisted upon us by religion finally boiled over to two world wars and tens of millions of deaths.

The collective "slap in the face" eroded our confidence in institutional leaders. Wow, look what these guys did. They killed and maimed our brothers and sisters, destroyed our families, wiped out large portions of international sects for what?

What did we learn? Well, let's have smaller wars instead, Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, and maybe Iran.

The great thing about technology is it has allowed more of us to separate ourselves from the mass. It has allowed us to express that we are individuals who do not necessarily want to follow blindly the leaders who wish the common person to protect their lives of privilege.

We shouldn't let our confusion over how that individuality is expressed to obscure why people want to separate from a culture that has over and again attempted to pit the have nots against each other so the top can sustain its self-actualizing lifestyles.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Thank you, Michael, for your candid remarks.

The purpose of my writing is to get readers to think, usually to things they take for granted. 

What you learn or fail to learn from what I say has much to do with your own set of biases, as my writing has to do with mine.  We never totally escape what has been programmed into our heads practically from birth no matter how much education, experience to the contrary or the reality of that experience.

Don't be offended when I say I disagree with you in this response in nearly every way. 

Religion was once responsible and accountable for something approaching a civil society. Religion has become increasingly political and combative fearing the handwriting is on the wall of its relevance if not extinction. 

Religion has gravitated to the status of a civil religion where money and power dominate.  The church is as guilty as any other institution fighting to have a share of this brand of civility, which I find is not very civil at the moment.

Civil society no longer exists in the United States or many other parts of the world.  Everything is ultimately measured in terms of wealth and power.

Nor is religion a functioning reality as purported in Christianity, Judaism, or many other isms.  These ideologies have become tainted with postmodernity greed and corruption as progress is measured in territorial imperatives. 

Conflict is the operational protocol of the planet and no place is safe with nuclear weapons of mass destruction the appetite of rogue nations.  

The only comforting aspect, and I agree we are in transition and in transformation, is that power is not having a good day. 

Power corrupts, as Lord Acton suggests, and absolutely power corrupts absolutely. 

The negative aspect of this is that leadership has become leaderless and dissonance reigns supreme.  Nobody is in charge!

It is a curiosity of the times that Harper Lee who is nearly blind and deaf has been encouraged to publish her first novel, which is the antithesis of "To Kill a Mockingbird." 

"Go Set a Watchman" (2015) exposes the other side of her mind, perhaps the real side.   The world so wanted to believe that side did not exist.

If you have ever read some of Mark Twain's dark prose, you have had an introduction to this sad and some might say sick side of his mind.  Only those interested in the exoteric are likely to know such writing exists.

The difference today is that this the sick side of the mind, the side we all have, has become commercial.  I call this the "surreal economy" for reason.

As far as technology connecting us, in my view, it has done just the opposite.  It has not only separated us from each other but separated us from ourselves. 

It is no accident that Bernie Zilbergeld has written a book with the title, "The Shrinking of America: Myths of Psychological Change" (1983).  Thirty-two years later, it still holds true only it has been accelerating into obfuscating mythology, fertile soil for exploitation.

Nor has technology liberated us, but instead incessantly bombards our sensitivities subliminally with a recipe of sick, senseless messages that we all have adopted to various degrees as variations of corporate speak.

Once, Roman Catholicism was my anchor and the focus of my life, but I came to find it was more political and vicious than any of my corporate employers only it could hide it with impressive subtlety.  

Every age has an explosive vocabulary that seeds confusion that assists those in power to remain so.  I've written about this in some detail in THE WORKER, ALONE!  Here I will mention only a couple of expressions: "false expectations."

Most Americans, whatever the color of their skin or circumstance, are precisely where they expect to be.  We gravitate to where we see ourselves being and how we see ourselves living. 

No matter how smart you are, no matter how well educated, no matter how low you are born into the food chain, no one owes you a living.  That is the mantra of America and has been since colonial days. 

Another expression is "social justice."  This expression is predicated on the misleading concept of what we all refer to has "the haves and the have nots." 

When barely 50 percent of those eligible to vote find the will to do so, and when those who vote tend to vote for people who express the same vitriolic contempt for the other side that they do, then the "haves" have no threat, no threat at all.

Just as politics have become vanilla with Democrats and Republicans being equally ineffective and dissembling and the same, religion has become vanilla as well. 

We live in a vanilla age and this has been unwittingly amplified by the Information Age.

Obviously, you disagree with me, but that is all right.  You have had the courage to express your views and that is your private window to your soul.  I respect that.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts, and

Always be well,

Jim

   

The Peripatetic Philosopher asks,

Are We Trapped Between Two Worlds?

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

© July 26, 2015

THIS IS NOT SOMETHING NEW

We have to go back to the time of St. Paul in the late first century to register some understanding of the madness of our time.

Paul was so convinced that it was the “end of days” and that man was on the cusp of seeing the return of man’s savior in the form of Jesus Christ that he preached that penultimate message.  

But time was not on Paul’s side, and as a result his followers increasingly had to face the hard reality of continued life in a world that remained very much as it had always been.  They were truly trapped between two conflicting worlds.

Today we are trapped between the surreal world of electronics and the real world of daily life.  

Evidence that we are so trapped is the bizarre behavior that has become so common to be the norm.

Take Paul’s view of men and women.  He describes to his followers in Galatia the ultimate ideal of God’s kingdom:

“For as many of you were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.  There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave or free, there is neither male nor female for you are all one in Christ” (Galatians 3:7-28).

THIS IS NOT A RELIGIOUS AGE

Less and less people are comfortable with this reference as this is not a religious age, far from it.  

Religion even in the time of Paul, which in many ways was as weird as our own, was central to the conduct of life be one Christian, Jewish or Pagan.  

There was an implicit sense of connection to something bigger than man, something outside man that was the miraculous and timeless, something believed to be God.

In only a single lifetime, a mere four generations, if you are lucky to live that long, you have seen this reverence, this sense of humility and modesty completely erode.  

Now, man is his own god, and for it he is trapped between the transformative surreal world of electronics and science and technology and the reality of everyday life.

So trapped, he was bound to act weird.  Men have forgotten what it is to be a man and woman have forgotten what it is to be a woman.  

We are moving so swiftly in this robotically devolved world that one day there may be no need for either men or women, but only robots.   

If robots want a few human specimens to entertain them, they can store male sperm and female eggs and clone a whole new race of a genetically controlled species. 

Meanwhile, like man of the first and second century, a new religion or a new surreal world in our case needs to be invented to give some focus, direction and sense of man’s destiny as tentative as it may be. 

Paul was the inventor of Christianity with many interpreters and elaborators over the centuries up through the 16^th century.  

Since that time, Christianity, which never had much to do with Jesus in any case, has eroded to its present status today, more a curiosity than a force of consequence.

WHEN SANITY TAKES A HOLIDAY

Human nature, or the nature of being human can get quite weird when feeling disconnected, and predictably it has.

People have lost their sense of identity not only in terms of sex roles but in terms of who they are. 

The evidence is there for everyone to see as people paint their bodies with tattoos to declare who they are just as primitives did those many eons ago.

Then, thunder and lightning, tornadoes and hurricanes, floods and earthquakes shattered their delicate psyches.  This shattering was done with such force that soothsayers and medicine men could tell them anything and they would believe because belief became their shelter.

Now, these medicine men and soothsayers are pundits, professors, scientists and politicians.  They are also the weird and the different and the fringe people of society who now have a powerful voice in this surreal media age of electronics. 

Eighty years ago, there were transgender people but today they have a national or international audience.  There is nothing wrong with being gay or a transgender person as this is a free country and sex role identity is a private affair.  

But we see Bruce Jenner, the former Olympic Decathlon Champion is going digital with his own television show on the “E” (standing for entertainment) channel. 

Something is wrong with this picture when we have to promulgate our personal choices of the most sensitive nature.  Where is the dignity, where is the self-respect, where is the modesty? 

Hollywood films were once monitored or classified by the Legion of Decency.  Now the most outrageous, most bestial, most gut wrenching disgusting are profitable business, and profit means everything in a surreal economy.

Now, we have a young man in one case and a middle aged man in another case going into a movie theatre and killing innocent people out for an evening’s entertainment.  

In another case, we have a young man going into an African American church prayer meeting, sitting down and being invited to participate.  Instead, he takes out a gun and kills several of them for no other reason than he hates the color of their skin.

IS SOCIETY HAVING A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN?

Nothing happens in an instant.  Breakdown is a gradual almost imperceptible affair.  Watching this happen over eight decades, common sense has been seen to be increasingly uncommon. 

When you aren’t comfortable in your own skin, and you get attention acting weird, in an earlier day, you either got your act together or you were isolated.  Now, you can get on television and have an audience.

Once individualism and freedom were celebrated, but now there is little or no individualism or freedom.  Instead, there is the prominence of the herd mentality and intrusive drones or surveillance cameras recording your every move.  This is the surreal world of today, while reality has come to be suffocating.

Emotional breakdown is common to some in every generation and in every age.

When an entire society is undergoing emotional breakdown, it isn’t even noticed.

*     *     *

The Peripatetic Philosopher reflects on:

The Great Giveaway!

The Complicit Con of Workers and Labor Unions!

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

© July 21, 2015

In the United States, the assimilation of labor to capital became apparent after the grand bargain of labor unions for workers of the 1950s, when unions in the steel and car industries traded their control over the shop floor for security and steady wages.

Steven Fraser, “The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power" (2015)

When I was a lad in the 1950s, I would spend part of every summer in Detroit, Michigan where my uncle, Dr. Leonard M. Ekland, was Chairman of the Department of Finance and Commerce at the University of Detroit. 

My uncle had a nice home but I noticed that hourly workers in the Detroit automotive industry, kids I played baseball with, had nicer homes with more amenities.  

My teammates lived in neighborhoods in which everyone in the extended family to grandparents worked at General Motors, Ford or Chrysler, and none of the boys I played with planned to go to college, bragging they could make more money building cars than a doctor of medicine could make with eight years of college.

I asked my Uncle Leonard about this, and he said, “Your friends exaggerate a little but not by much.”  He then told me how workers had forfeited their power for cash, and that ultimately they would be the losers in the bargain.

From that point forward, I was something of a student of the working man having a father with only a seventh grade education barely making a living, while myself feeling somewhat envious of these families in my summers in Detroit. 

By the accident of circumstances, I would work as a laborer in the summers of the 1950s in a large refinery that turned Iowa corn into starch, gluten, sugar, lactic acid and syrup, receiving the same wages as other workingmen in that work, which provided me with sufficient funds to acquire a college education.  

I remember from those days my uncle remarking that workers had no power, but many perks because they belonged to a shortsighted union that mirrored Detroit's automotive management's greed.  This made no sense to me at the time.   

It was the gravy train years of labor with the gratuitous magnanimity of management as benefactor.  

By the 1960s, a professional class of workers was inching its way into the workforce.  It was also the post-WWII days of management euphoria.

Prudence was put aside with management voting itself more and more of the economic pie while solidifying its power and dominance over labor.  

Little did I know that one day I would participate in this economic holocaust of the workers' status quo.  

However, I have never been comfortable with this.  After all, I came out of the labor working class and took no comfort watching it become the underclass.

Not being an academic, economist or historian, perhaps in my directness, I have come off more angry and agitated than persuasive.  

Whatever the perception, for the past quarter century, I have written a series of books and scores of articles with the central theme of workers' acquiescence or compliance in the face of their eroding power and dignity.

Compounding the problem the professional working class out of which I came is behaving precisely the same and has been doing so since the 1970s.

Today, management is anachronistic (see Work Without Managers (1991, 2^nd edition 2014) and managers are atavistic (see The Worker, Alone! (1995, 2^nd edition 2015), while compensation and perks no longer enjoy any equity with either blue-collar or white collar workers as senior management has come to exercise a greed never before imagined (see Corporate Sin (2000, 2^nd edition 2014).

Paradoxically, what is abominable about this is that 90 percent of the workforce in the United States today is professional with a clear intellectual edge with a knowledge power that far exceeds the relevance or efficacy of management’s position power.

Yet, workers, college trained or not, are behaving obeisantly to management's demands as if work is in a time warp of the 1950s.

A HISTORIAN WEIGHS IN ON THE PROBLEM

Labor historian Steve Fraser’s “The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power” argues that deepening economic hardship for workers combined with management’s “insatiable lust for excess” that resembles a Second Gilded Age with the wealth stratification of the Age of the Robber Barons (i.e., Rockefeller, Mellon, Pullman and Carnegie).

As Fraser forcefully shows, during the First Gilded Age, loosely defined between the end of the Civil War and the Stock Market Crash of 1929, American elites were threatened with more than embarrassing statistics.  

They endured a frontal attack from labor with workers fighting and dying when police, the army and thugs dispersed them when they collectively fought for and won substantially higher wages, better workplace conditions, progressive taxation and, ultimately, the modern welfare state.

To solve the mystery of why sustained resistance to wealth inequality has gone missing in the United States ever since, Fraser devotes the first half of the book to documenting the cut and thrust of the First Gilded Age.  He writes: 

The mass movement strikes that shut down cities and enjoyed the support of much of the population; the Eight Hour Leagues that dramatically cut the length of the workday, fighting for the universal right to leisure and time “for what we will”; the vision of a “ ‘cooperative commonwealth’ in place of the Hobbesian nightmare that Progress had become.”

He reminds readers that although “class war” is considered un-American today, bracing populist rhetoric was once the lingua franca of the nation. 

American presidents’ bashed “economic royalists,” and immigrant garment workers demanded not just “bread and roses” but threatened “bread or blood.”

It is inconceivable in these complacent times to imagine this, especially when workers, professional or not, turn the other cheek to have it slapped rather than to put up their hands and fight.  That was not the case in the 1930s and 1940s in the United States.

Of course violence went both ways. Protests and strikes consistently faced bloody attacks from both state forces (National Guard and State Police) and hired guns (thugs).  This prompted the formation of various armed worker militias. Populists and socialists were attacked as “ungrateful hyenas” or “mad dogs,” while conservative newspapers openly called on the state to “exterminate” the “mob.”

Workers ignored this abuse and pushed courageously forward.

The class war, in other words, was no mere metaphor with workers willing to spill blood so that workers in the future would have some kind of life.

Fraser offers several explanations for this wave of the post-Civil War bold labor resistance, including the intellectual legacy of the abolition movement.

Think of it.  The workers' dilemma in their eyes was comparable to slavery.  The fight against slavery had emboldened a radical component of the labor movement to show that the barbarianism of slavery and the market’s capacity of capitalism to enslave workers was equally inhumane.

With bonded labor now illegal, the target pivoted to factory “wage slavery.” This comparison sounds strange to contemporary ears, but as Fraser reminds us, for European peasants and artisans, as well as American homesteaders, the idea of selling one’s labor for money was profoundly alien.

This is key to Fraser’s thesis.

What ­fueled the resistance to the First Gilded Age, he argues, was the fact that many Americans had a recent memory of a different kind of economic system, whether in America or back in Europe.

Many at the forefront of the resistance were actively fighting to protect a way of life, whether it was the family farm that was being lost to predatory creditors or small-scale artisans being wiped out by industrial capitalism. Having known something different from their grim present, they were capable of imagining and fighting for a radically better future.

It is this imaginative capacity that is missing from our Second Gilded Age, a theme to which Fraser returns again and again.

The latest inequality chasm for the professional workforce as well as the underclass of poorly educated workers has opened up at a time when there is no popular memory of another kind of economic system.

As an organizational development (OD) psychologist, I found professionals as reactive and passive, complacent and as accommodating to management as blue-collar workers.

These professionals forget that they have weapons in knowledge and skills, vision and perception, cunning and resilience never before possessed by workers as a collective body, but, alas, they are only schooled in an economic system of compliance and conformity to the demands of management.

Stated another way, they have the intellectual capital that the organization needs and doesn’t have for it doesn't exist in management.

Whereas the activists and agitators of the First Gilded Age straddled two worlds, professionals find themselves fully within capitalism’s matrix. 

So while we can demand slight improvements to our current conditions, we have a great deal of trouble believing in something else entirely.

Fraser devotes several chapters to outlining the key “fables” which, he argues, have served as particularly effective ­resistance-avoidance tools. 

These range from the billionaire as rebel to the supposedly democratizing impact of mass stock ownership to the idea that contract work is a form of liberation. Professionals have bought this con and it is palpable in all their dealings.

Fraser also explores various forces that have a “self-policing” impact from mass indebtedness to mass incarceration; from the fear of having your job deported to the fear of having yourself deported.

Fear is the elixir of control and subliminal spin the mechanism to inculcate the idea of consumerism and capitalism as the natural order of things.  

This growing shift away from responsible challenge of the system towards what Fraser calls “a sensibility of irony and even cynical disengagement rather than a morally charged universe of utopian yearnings and dystopian forebodings” is pervasive. 

With this catalog of disempowerment, which I and other authors have recorded in depressing detail, it has not deterred the production economy from being uncoupled from the financial economy. 

In the Second Gilded Age profitability has depended on the cannibalizing of the industrial factory system erected during the First Gilded Age.  Exporting production and jobs has resulted in capital liquidation to the four corners of the globe. 

Put another way, this dialectic of accumulation and disaccumulation that has become global has hollowed out our American cities and ravaged the lives of our American workers. 

High finance has been allowed to gut the American heartland while layoffs, redundant exercises and reengineering of corporate enterprise has become the runaway key to enhancing Dow Jones Industrials and shareholder value.

Fraser writes:

“What was getting bought, stripped and closed up during the late 20^th century, was the flesh and bone of a century and a half of American manufacturing.”

By the 1990s, for the first time in more than a century, the life expectancy among the less well educated declined and upward mobility shifted into reverse.      

 AN EXISTENTIAL JOURNEY THAT CONFIRMS BUT QUESTIONS THE EFFICACY OF FRASER’S THESIS

It has been the nature of my life and work that not only have I spent much of my time in the climate of Steven Fraser’s thesis, but I have worked or been involved in virtually every aspect of American society.  Many of my generation can claim the same.

This is from being a student in parochial and public schools, land grant and private universities:

Then a laborer in a manufacturing facility, a chemist in R&D, chemical sales engineer, line manager in the field and an executive in the corporation, working internationally, among which included the facilitating of the formation of a new company in South Africa.

It also involved acting as consultant to Fortune 500 companies, then in a staff function as an OD psychologist in a Fortune 100 company, and later a staff executive in its international division.

A stint followed as an academic in the role of an adjunct professor, and finally as a lecturer, keynote speaker, and author of fiction and nonfiction books in the genre of work, workers and the workplace.

Working five summers as a laborer I found workers complained but never to the boss.  When I was an R&D chemist in the same company, technicians and chemist behaved the same.  

I saw passive behaviors as a chemical sales engineer and consultant to Fortune 100 companies, and as a field manager and international executive.   

Later, in the process of acquiring my Ph.D., I saw academics behaving just as childish as laborers and chemists.  Indeed, I found academia resembled a factory more than any other type. 

Then as a consultant to Fortune 500 companies and a contract consultant to The American Management Association, I saw the same behavior with private as well as public sector employees.  

Everywhere in every situation I found those employed acquiescing to the demands of those in charge with nary a protest except amongst themselves.  

Steven Fraser sees the climate I describe here as ripe for rebellion and transformation but this rings hollow to this observer. 

Professional workers are still acting like lapdogs.  

Fraser mentions the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, but that tiger had no teeth. 

We are a leaderless society with dissonant workers, but armed with college degrees, which, incidentally, was a modified version of the subtitle of my book, Corporate Sin (2000, 2^nd edition 2014). 

We hear absolutely nothing directly from the leaders of contemporary movements, all of whom are struggling daily with the questions at the heart of this book.

*     *     *

The Conversation Continues:

WHAT DID YOU LEARN, UNLEARN? Re: BROODING OF THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER

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

© July 20, 2015

THE READER RESPONDS AGAIN:

Dr. Fisher,

You ask, "What did I learn or unlearn?"

I must agree in the sense that we all are sane with generous amounts of madness sprinkled here and there.  We each have our quirks.  We as a nation are in for more than we will be able to stomach as the candidates’ line up and we choke on the feeding frenzy.  Viewed "The Last Hurrah" with Spencer Tracy recently and politics are politics. 

In the 1950's the communists poured cement into the Cave Church in Budapest to prevent St. Ivan's cave being used for worship services.  The Paulist Monks were deemed traitors.  This was not the first time nor will it be the last religion to take a hit.

Catholics were as abused as the Jew and Negro.  Precious few clubs allowed membership, and we have covered this ground before, the Irish called chimpanzees by the English, and a multitude of "names" for the Poles, Italians and many others thrown around generously.

Today, hate marches with its head held high on the main streets of the USA and we see it everywhere.  How do we separate the madness and the sane?  Are you saying we need to temper both with an equal amount of each? 

I have read your most recent contribution and find it pointing towards viewpoint as the answer to differences.  But no excuses for indifference. 

RW

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Dear RW,

Thank you for your patience with me.  

You could have taken umbrage with my remarks and gone off sulking in disgust, but you didn’t.  You recognized that in conversation between two people who are attempting to connect they invariably come from different perspectives with differing points of view and lifetime experiences.  That is why I applaud you for your patience with me.

You bring up a lot of good points, however, I am looking at this from a differing perspective.

To get inside my designation of "madness," you need only substitute the word "passion."  In many ways, I see our age, at least in the Western sense, close to passionless except in making money and power grabs.  That is madness of another guise masquerading as sanity, but I am not on about that.   

I use madness because it is unconscious of political correctness or being esteemed by the herd or the boss or the family or the church or the ties to a community.  It has an all-consuming designation that trumps everything.

We saw it in General William Tecumseh Sherman and his “March to the Sea” through the South in the American Civil War, breaking the will and resistance of the Confederacy.

We saw it in General then President Andrew Jackson in the “Battle of New Orleans,” decimating the British Army and Navy in its attempt to regain control after the American Revolution.  And indeed, we saw it in Andrew Jackson as a boy when he stood up to the British officer that told him to polish his boots.

There was a madness to Sherman and Jackson that without it the United States of America would not be the nation that it is today.

Alas, we have seen it in every aspect and every period of man's history without exception.  Greatness and madness are as fundamental to the character of leadership as will is to power.  Nassir Ghaemi, an American psychiatrist, has written about this phenomenon in “A First-Rate Madness” (2011), profiling leaders through the past two centuries.  

It was Aristotle, after all, who said:

“Why is it that all those who have become above average either in philosophy, politics, poetry or the arts seem to be melancholy and some to such an extent that they are even seized by the disease of black bile?”

So many are afraid of their passion, afraid to assert themselves, afraid to step out of the crowd for fear of rebuke or embarrassment. 

We are in an age that wants to fit, wants to belong, wants to be accepted, wants to be appreciated.  So if celebrities and professional athletes desecrate their bodies with tattoo, we do ours. 

Can you imagine anyone under the age of fifty admitting that they don’t possess or know how to operate an iPhone?  You would think not having or knowing how to operate such a device were the equivalent of having leprosy.     

Then there are such people as Paul the Apostle who lived 2,000 years ago and established a religion out of his imagination and vision called “Christianity,” clearly a disturbed man and possibly epileptic, who burned, burned, burned with passion and created a religion that dominates the world today.  Was this not madness?

It is not that such people as St. Paul took the road not traveled, but they cut through the bush and established a pathway to the future.  In the case of Paul, he established a religion very different than the teachings of Jesus, the center piece of his mythology, bearing no or very little resemblance to the early Christianity of Jesus’s brother, James.

James was the leader of the early Christians and not Apostle Peter, which Roman Catholicism insists.  Consequently, the Seat of the Papacy and Roman Catholicism being as it is Rome and St. Peters Cathedral indicates how reality can vary with history.      

Should you be interested, a very readable scholar, James D. Tabor’s book, “Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity” (2012), provides insight into how this was accomplished.

Madness has more prosaic forms.  For example, there is madness in a writer that continues to explore the corners of his mind, and to record the evidence found there irrespective of its relevance to a wider audience much less whether or not such ponderings prove ephemeral.  His madness recognizes that he is as much a pioneer as those who explore external galaxies only in his madness he has the audacity to explore the internal galaxies within unconcerned as to the possible pointlessness of the extravagance. 

This madness or passion, if you prefer, is self-generated, unbounded and yet it has the focus and energy and discipline without having to have or to rely upon any conscious mechanism.  It simply “is.”

Contrast this with our sane capitalistic world that is very conscious of its existence and has to remind us again and again of its relevance and necessity. 

Schopenhauer was right when he insisted that everything can be reduced to “will and power,” or to energy and fields of force, as man operates in a space-time framework of physics consistent with his philosophy. 

“Motives,” Schopenhauer says, “are causes experienced from within.”  Were he to have lived in the 20^th Century, when physics reached its apogee, he would have seen the empirical world and all its objects and actions reduced to this proposition. 

“Will and Power” have led to weapons of mass destruction and devices that take us out of ourselves and into the surreal world of electronics.  “Will and Power” has no personality, no intelligence, it is a madness within to create with no other goal and no restrictions, and it is the madness of our age.

We seem to be imitating the universe where stars expand, explode, heating then cooling, then rotating on their asses. We seem to be imitating this phenomenon and to have learned nothing from The Great Depression of 1929 or the more recent near global depression in 2008.    

These WMD’s and electronic devices are symptoms of a phenomenon.  That is my point.  WMDs have been created then rationalized as deterrents in the first case while electronic devices have become necessities in the second. 

This is a manifestation of man’s creativity and "progress," when progress is a phenomenon without purpose or goal, but seemingly an impersonal force over which we have no control.  This, to my mind, is madness under the guise of sanity. 

Meanwhile, we have real problems in our crowded world.  Well over 3.5 billion people on this small globe have little to keep body and soul intact.  The world’s population has swelled from 2 billion souls when I was born to 7.2 billion today and yet the poverty that existed then has only increased as the population has exploded. 

Technology could eradicate most poverty and starvation but this, too, is guided by impersonal forces, another case of madness masquerading as sanity.

Compounding this madness of sanity, but closer to home, we have parents who can barely keep a roof over the family’s head and food on the table see to it that their children younger than teenagers have iPhones.  Is this not madness masquerading as sanity?

You can take comfort in knowing that media pundits and scholars, philosophers and theologians, authors and academics have trouble with this differentiation as they are often part of the problem.  They mainly ignore Schopenhauer’s dictum while they behave consistent with it.  

There is possible breakthrough, but it requires going against the grain of established protocols.  For years I have been saying that selfishness, not the selflessness promulgated by society and the church is the key.

My thesis is simple: unless you love yourself, unless you accept yourself as you are, warts and all, every attempt to show love, acceptance or tolerance of others is a fraud. 

Moreover, I say that pleasing the self-first is more important than pleasing anyone else because with that self-regard your life and actions are authentic and genuine.  Otherwise, they are not.

This is not consistent with Paulist Christian ethics or contemporary philosophy, psychology and theology.  

It is, however, the reason I have had to focus my writing on such prosaic subjects as selling, work, the worker and the workplace, but always consistent with that psychology.

In the June 1993 issue of The Reader's Digest, I open with this simple sentence: To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself. 

In 1970, at Prentice-Hall, publishers of Confident Selling, I was asked to describe what the book was about.

I wrote: To penetrate the facade of the self, it is necessary to accept yourself as you are, and then it will follow you will more likely accept others as you find them.

We have a biased wall to penetrate before we can listen and comprehend what another person is saying.  This wall is natural to our defense system and prevents conscious tolerance of another person or that person’s point of view.  It is, therefore, critical not only to selling but to all interpersonal exchanges that this wall of skepticism be penetrated to connect.

My point is that before you can sell anyone anything you must first make a sale on yourself. 

The greatest madness, alas, the greatest challenge is to believe in oneself.

Our culture is obsessed with sanity, obsessed with things making sense, believing that thinking precedes feeling, when it is and always has been the reverse of this. 

Moreover, and our federal government displays this insanity, as does Europe now in yet another bailout of Greece.  It will not work as it has never work, but the bail outers feel good about themselves.

I wrote in 1996 in The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend:

To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons.  The same holds true for ourselves.  

People don't want to get inside the ideas I lay out in plain sight.  They want answers not their problems defined.

In a sanity driven capitalistic culture such as ours, Nobel Laureates in Economics present solutions and that is how they win their distinction.  It is a global disease of a solution driven culture and I do my best not to contribute to this disease.

No, I am not looking for balance between sanity and madness.  I am looking for a modicum of madness in the form of passion that I find masquerading as winning, when winning has nothing to do with what I am proposing.

Jim

 

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