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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