The Peripatetic Philosopher shares an excerpt:

WELCOME TO HELL! OUR NEXT STOP HEAVEN!

                                                                                                          

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

© August 11, 2015

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I

NOTE:

This is a short excerpt from Self-Confidence: The Illusive Key to Health and Happiness.  It should be ready for publication in late Fall 2015.

There is no time in which anxiety, free floating or otherwise, is of greater intensity than during those halcyon days of college.  

Rollo May devotes a good deal of his book The Meaning of Anxiety (1977) to anxiety and its development of the self.  College, compressed into a short number of years, isolated from the real world, and confined to variable ideas, theories, truths, facts, myths and biases, is a time of much anxiety and agitation. 

Uncertainty, depression, stress, distress, confusion, and anxiety compete for the student’s constant attention.  And if that were not enough, associated demons play havoc with the student’s dreams while asleep.

When I am in a state of anxiety, a variation of two dreams dominates.  One, I am afraid to get my grades for fear I have flunked out.  Mind you, I graduated from university a half century ago.  The second dream, I have forgotten my class schedule – what class I am supposed to be attending, where and what time – and find myself lost on campus.  I encounter students rushing to class, but am too embarrassed to ask them where my class might be meeting.  I wake up in a cold sweat, and go to my study to write, unable to sleep the rest of the night. 

Someone might look at my accomplishments, then at my comfortable existence, and say, “How is that possible?”  Soren Kierkegaard had the answer:

To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose oneself.  So it is too that in the eyes of the world it is dangerous to venture.  And why?  Because one may lose.  But not to venture is shrewd.  And yet, by not venturing, it is so dreadfully easy to lose that which it would be difficult to lose in even the most venturesome venture, and in any case never so easily, so completely as if it were nothing – one’s self.  For if I have ventured amiss – very well, then life helps me by its punishment.  But if I have not ventured at all – who then helps me?  And, moreover, if by not venturing at all in the highest sense (and to venture in the highest sense is precisely to become conscious of oneself) I have gained all earthly advantages . . . and lose my self!  What of that? [5]

Long before I knew Kierkegaard’s words, I was stumbling and bumbling along, and ineptly but diligently embracing my resistance to my anxiety.  I found it true that the creative imagination is stimulated by accepting anxiety as real with lessons to teach us, that it is important to resist the urge to find safe haven in some cage.   

Each of us has a role in life to play involving the positive aspects of our selfhood.  We develop as individuals as we confront, move through and overcome anxiety-creating experiences.  There have been many people along my long life that have opened the door of my cage, which I have not always heeded.  When I have, the road ahead became easier.

IS KAFKA’S TRIAL OUR OWN?

 How often I have heard variations of Kafka’s lament in his book The Trial (1925):

 Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning. 

It is a novel of vast symbolism and a bracing psychological study of a system whose leaders are convinced of their own righteousness.  To some the court is a symbol of the Church as an imperfect bridge between the individual and God.  More pertinent to today, it appears more likely a symbolic bridge between corporate society and economic security. 

 It is a challenge to trust the “system” to produce the leadership necessary to bring about social justice along with comfort and security to individuals collectively in that society.  No surprise, given the speed with which technology has emasculated society, Western civilization in particular and the rest of the world in general is failing badly in leadership. 

 This implies that the burden of the responsibility of leadership is a few individuals and not the responsibility of the individual.  Note: 

Everyone is a leader or no one is a leader.  

There is no way a few individuals in leadership roles can bridge the gap between the ideal and the real in the world of everyday life by themselves.  What happened to Joseph K happens every day because the passive majority expects their wishes to materialize without any effort on their part at all.

Plants close, jobs disappear, industries evaporate, communities become lifeless, values change, as well as sacred beliefs, skills become anachronistic, positions become atavistic, neighborhoods are erased from the map to make way for progress, and in a crushing state of anxiety, fingers are pointed in all directions except back at the individual.  

In this crippling sense of anxiety, who do we elect to public office?  Do we elect people who remind us of our leadership responsibility?  No, we elect people who promise us to ease our pain, create jobs, and improve our circumstances.  We elect counterfeit leaders to perpetuate our counterfeit existence, and wonder why we become increasingly dependent suspended in our own self-pitying misery.

Although we are repeatedly disappointed in leaders who make promises that they cannot keep, we cannot rise to accept the fact that leaders are probably as lost as we are.  What is a person to do when he has done nothing wrong?  But is that true?

We can’t change the world to fit us but we can change ourselves to fit the world.  Managing anxiety involves the self-development of the self to an ever-changing world.  W. H. Auden captures this in The Age of Anxiety (1947):

. . . . it is silly

To refuse the tasks of time

And, overlooking our lives,

Cry – “Miserable wicked me,

How interesting I am.”

We would rather be ruined than changed,

We would rather die in our dread

Than climb the cross of the moment

And let our illusions die.

We remain architects of our destiny no matter how much we would prefer giving that role to someone else.  In the end as in the beginning, all we ever have is ourselves to blame.

*     *     *

 REFERENCES:

[1] Rachel graduated with honors from a top prep high school.  With advanced courses already completed in high school, she will register as a second semester sophomore as she enters college in the fall of 2014.

[2] This tense experience is given a novelist treatment in A Green Island in a Black Sea: A Novel of South Africa During Apartheid (2014), which is available on Kindle.

[3] See James R. Fisher, Jr.’s unconventional approach in Confident Selling (1971, 2^nd edition 2014), as well as in A Green Island in a Black Sea.  Long before he was acquainted with Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking (1977), he was practicing the approach.  For example, Confident Selling looks at the prospect as a partner not an adversary, and the selling of systems not products or services. 

The titles of other books follows this lateral thinking theme (Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1991, 2^nd edition 2015), The Worker, Alone!  Going against the Grain (1995, 2^nd edition 2015), Meet Your New Best Friend (1996, 2^nd edition 1996, 2^nd edition 2014), Six Silent Killers (1998, 2^nd edition 2014), Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaders and Dissonant Workers (2000, 2^nd edition 2014), and Time Out for Sanity: Blueprint for Dealing with an Anxious Age (2007, 2^nd edition 2015).  All of these books are available on Kindle or TATE Publishing Company.

[4] The memoir is In the Shadow of the Courthouse: A Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel (2003, 2^nd edition 2014).

[5] Soren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, Princeton University Press, 1941, p. 52.