The Peripatetic Philosopher responds:

  A Reader Responds to

“JUST SAY ‘NO!’”

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

© September 30, 2015

NOTE:

As the reader reacts to this referenced excerpt, I am sorry I made him late for his exercise class, but am pleased that the piece made him reflect.  “Self-Confidence: The Elusive Key to Health and Happiness” is written just for that purpose, to make readers think and reflect.

A READER WRITES

Dr. Jim,

You have made me late for the gym.  Okay, I have made myself late for I wouldn’t say “NO!” to your excerpt from your book.

I enjoyed it a lot.

That is probably because I think I actually understood much of it, and found I agreed with it.

Many years ago, I told a contemporary that I felt my job as a parent was to raise my children in a manner that ensured that they no longer needed me by the time they finished school.

He objected to that idea saying that he wanted his children to always need him.  I told him I wanted them to want me, but not to need me.

While I suppose my daughters remember many more lectures, I only remember deliberately giving them the advice of being truthful, and what it meant to be truthful, and the fact that this included the business of being truthful to yourself.

The second advice was about controlling your debt, and the reasons for that and how if uncontrolled it would ultimately and unquestionably lead to issues regarding truthfulness.

Moreover, I certainly concur with this paragraph in your piece:

“Another factor that needs much more attention to explain success and failure vis-à-vis IQ is the character, composition and nurturing capacity of the environment. 

“Minorities and inner city children are unlikely to have the climate to grow intellectually that is available in the suburbs.

“Then there is the business of parental involvement, psychological encouragement and readiness to be there when their children need mentoring. In a word, self-confidence and success go well beyond an IQ index.”

That leads me to the business of “America’s failing schools.” They are about this and not really about inadequate funding, inadequate facilities, or inadequate teachers.

Unfortunately, breaking the cycle is enormously difficult under the best of circumstances, but because our society only permits blaming the schools, etc., rather than admitting the real reason for the failure to learn we cannot hope to fix the problem.

Anyway, thanks for another good thought piece.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS

Your relationship to your daughters reminds me of an Erich Fromm observation in “The Art of Loving” (1978):

“Mature love says, ‘I need you because I love you’; immature love says, ‘I love you because I need you’.”

You express mature love, your friend expresses immature love.

Regarding education, what you say has merit. But the problem is even more basic than that. It is also – the way educational needs are handled – an indication of mature versus immature love.

We Americans are proud to continuously announce to the world how generous we are, and it is true, Americans are very generous.

You get inside that generosity and you see we have a more basic problem with intimacy.

We would rather throw money at a problem and hope some of it sticks than get involved and committed in solving of the problem.

It has not always been that way. Alexis de Tocqueville, when he came to America in the 1830s, and wrote “Democracy in America” (1834) found Americans involved and enthusiastically volunteering to help others.

In a word, being intimately committed and involved was not a problem then, but it is a societal issue today.

We have become insular and distrustful of others, especially strangers. So, we wrap ourselves in what we perceive to be security by staying close to our ethnicity and socioeconomic class.

Out of guilt, or perhaps collective memory, Americans have no trouble throwing money at problems. It is the capitalistic way.

You can see the evidence everywhere, the rise of privileged prep schools for affluent children so that they will qualify for prestigious academic universities, and won’t have to mingle with the less advantaged; in exclusive affluent residential communities that only the affluent can afford; while the rest of us build fences around our houses and minds in an equal attempt to live in a secluded world a safe distance from such thorny problems as education.

Show me the intimacy in Facebook, or those obsessively committed to tweeting and texting, or indeed, to young people who are afraid of the intimacy and commitment of marriage, while preferring to enjoy all its conveniences without its concomitant responsibilities.

Societal problem, including education, which is so fundamental to the survival of society, will never be adequately handled when most of us prefer to observe life a safe distance from each other, which paradoxically, includes an equally safe distance from ourselves.   

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares:

JUST SAY, “NO!”

THE HARDEST WORD IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE TO SAY

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

© March 17, 2014

© September 29, 2015

REFERENCE:

  

This is another excerpt from Self-Confidence: The Elusive Key to Health and Happiness, which is progressing nicely.  It will be a Kindle e-book joining two others.  Thirteen of my books are in print and well as e-books.   

Erin go bragh! (Ireland Forever!)

THE CHECKOUT CLERK WHO COULD NOT SAY “NO!”

  

Depositing purchases made by my wife, Betty, into the shopping cart, the spinning plastic bags rotating on the turnstile, listening to the cashier at the checkout as she expertly pressed the electronic key to the barcodes, then deposited the purchases in bags, sometimes double bagging should the purchases be too heavy for a single bag, all the time talking. Her nervous staccato jarred my senses to reflect on the hardest word in the English language to ever utter, “No!”

This nice lady with an Irish lilt to her lovely voice, plump, cherubic, middle aged, a woman with tired eyes but a stalwart chin, was working at Walmart as a cashier, a job she desperately needed, and was not afraid to admit it. But that was not what I found unsettling. It was the content of her chatter.

She was telling my wife, "My son and his girlfriend moved into my apartment, a tiny one-bedroom place, and I'm beside myself on what to do. They asked me if they could stay. How could I not say 'yes'?"

She looked to my wife for support, was met only with rapt attention.

“We got our bonus check for the year. Mine was for $114. It is usually $200 or more. I had to use it all for groceries to feed them, what else could I do? They have to eat.

"You see my son doesn’t have a job."

She turned to me bagging away imploring my eyes for understanding. I gave her a noncommittal look. She continued.

“What if the girlfriend gets pregnant,” pushing her hand through her as if the gesture might get rid of that possibility, “then what?”

She glanced at me again perhaps thinking I was reading her mind and had an answer. I turned away.

"My place is not big enough for me much less company."

All the time, she never lost the rhythm of her barcode clicking, or filling the bags, rotating the turnstile or losing her place in the story.

“It is my own fault isn’t it,” she confessed without conviction. “I could have said, ‘no,’ now couldn’t I?" Then declaring rather effusively, "There is no way I can make my bills and afford to feed them. I have no place for me, no privacy, no chance to unwind at day’s end, now do I?”

At this point, I had to walk away, and Betty got out her credit card to pay. I couldn’t let her or the checkout clerk see my anger. I felt a deep sadness as I wheeled the steel cart out to the car. 

How many relatives I have had who were like this good woman? How many of my cousins and friends were sandwiched into houses or households where they no longer belonged? How many parents or parents’ of parents were given a guilt trip by their wayward dysfunctional progeny if they didn’t take them in?

How often this was an Irish ritual I observed in my growing up years that became so common no one talked about it, thought about it, or did much about it except cave in to the pressure and guilt.

The first five-years of my life I knew of such a ritual personally, and have hated it all these many years later, a ritual when my whole family as I knew it was only my little sister, Patsy Ann.

We would be with relatives or foster parents, I remember an Aunt Sadie, or other people who, like her, weren't our relatives. Then, we were split up and I went to my grand Aunt and Uncle. Lovely people, they had already seven grandchildren of their own living with them of various sons and daughters at the time.

I never heard my Aunt or Uncle complain. It had to be hard on them. For me, it made an indelible impression on my psyche. I promised this would never happen to me. It never has, although many times it could have.

BEYOND IQ

Early on, I made it clear to my children that once they left the nest they were on their own as we of The Great Depression Generation had been forced to be on our own, and it didn’t hurt us, but made us dig deep into our souls and find what we were made of, and not compare and compete to explain away how we were disadvantaged coming of age in such desperate circumstances. The consequence was that many developed self-reliance and discovered a backbone.

My generation was obsessed with IQ or the Intelligent Quotient, which is determined by dividing the person’s Mental Age by the Chronological Age and multiplying this by 100. The Stanford-Binet IQ test was prominent in my day.

The Stanford–Binet Intelligence Test was from the original Binet-Simon Scale by Lewis M. Terman, a psychologist at Stanford University. It is a cognitive ability and intelligence test that is used to diagnose developmental or intellectual deficiencies in young children. The test measures five weighted factors and consists of both verbal and nonverbal subtests. The five factors being tested are knowledge, quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial processing, working memory, and fluid reasoning.

It is still used while many myths associated with it continue unabated although proven unreliable, such as that intelligence is fixed for life, that the higher the IQ the more likely the individual is to be successful, that if you don’t have a high IQ you should not dream of being rich and famous, brilliant in some field, or rise to a position of leadership.

IQ has warped many of my generation because the IQ index was treated with the infallible authority as if it were an encyclical from the Holy Father, the Pope of Rome as if dogma.

Yet, someone like James Dewey Watson (born April 6, 1928), of The Great Depression Generation, who admits to having an average IQ (110 range), managed to become an American molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist.

Not stopping with those achievements, he became the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA in 1953 with Francis Crick. Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

To say he was diligent and curious to the extreme doesn’t even cover it. He believed in himself and had the confidence in that belief to be all that he could be. He earned degrees at the University of Chicago (B.S., 1947) and Indiana University (Ph.D., 1950) following that with a post-doctoral year at Copenhagen University with Herman Kalckar and Ole Maaloe. He then worked at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory in England, where he first met his future Nobel Prize collaborator and friend Francis Crick. [1] The rest is history.

* * *

Columnist David Brooks of the New York Times sometimes varies off his day job of reporting on politics to go deeply into the social self in The Social Animal (2011). Here he exposes the biases in modern culture that overemphasize rationalism, individualism, and the I.Q. He does this not as an expert but as a person learning from the pain and memory of his own youth, which obviously was his greatest teacher, along with what he has learned along the way with his research. He writes in The Social Animal:

Once a person crosses the IQ threshold of 120, there is little relationship between more intelligence and better performance. A person with a 150 IQ is in theory much smarter than a person with a 120 IQ, but those additional 30 points produce little measurable benefit when it comes to lifetime success. [2]

No question, the ability to do well on IQ tests is significantly influenced by heredity. The single strongest predictor of IQ is the IQ of the mother. People with high IQs do better in school and in school-like settings. Yet, in life, what compounds if not contradicts this is people with reasonable rather than outstanding IQs but superior work ethics have been defying experts for more than a century.

Another factor that needs much more attention to explain success and failure vis-à-vis IQ is the character, composition and nurturing capacity of the environment. Minorities and inner city children are unlikely to have the climate to grow intellectually that is available in the suburbs. Then there is the business of parental involvement, psychological encouragement and readiness to be there when their children need mentoring. In a word, self-confidence and success go well beyond an IQ index.

As to those aspiring to great wealth, a study of 7,403 Americans who participated in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, conducted by Jay Zagorsky of Ohio State, found no correlation between accumulating great wealth and high IQ. [3]

NO ANSWERS IN THE DEEP HOLES IN THE SOUL

David Brooks writes about the conscious and unconscious layers to our personality and make-up. This is quite a challenge as the deep self is alien territory to most of us, as we don’t allow our minds to have that conversation with ourselves. We go along to get along buying into the popular notions of what we can’t do, can’t be, and best not think about. We see ourselves as quite average and practically everyone else we see or read about as exceptional. So, why bother, right?

The basic problem is having low expectations for and of ourselves.

We don’t think we have a right to a center independent of the demands of others, including family. This is necessary for our own self-preservation. Being able to say “No!” is a basic requirement for being able to function as a healthy and engaged individuals.

The irony is that the more you do for others the less they do for themselves and therefore you penalize their development, independence, self-reliance and happiness.

Meanwhile, a voice deep within us, a voice we often ignore is likely to be constantly gnawing away at our conscience from deep within us that tells us we are much more than we are letting ourselves know or be. The pain of this gnawing sensation can act as an inducement to do something, to be something that lifts us out of our malaise, or if can drive us deeper into depression as if we have a hole in our soul. That hole is likely a product of never standing our ground, pleasing others at the expense of pleasing self, not wanting to hurt someone else feelings, but having no trouble hurting one’s own. It is masochism to the extreme.

That pain echoed in my mind from memory of my Irish clan as I listened to that checkout clerk at Walmart. She feels trapped and her son has exploited her self-imprisoning mindset to his advantage and that of his girlfriend. Why does this feel so strange?

The checkout clerk’s dilemma is rooted in her hapless efforts to escape family and to function apart from its continuing demands. She is the product of a culture where the family never stops being central.

As you read these pages, you will observe I ask the reader to think outside that box, to look outward to the oppressive world of collapsing corporate power in on the individual. That power includes government policy, science, economics and our collective history.

Our cultural history is treated as if a religion. As such, we are obeisant to corporate power while corporate power is not obliged to play by the same rules. Consequently, the checkout clerk feels she has no choice but to jeopardize her health and economic stability by taking in her son and his girlfriend. It is morality as an invisible hand that is not designed to serve but to question that individual’s self-interests. Consequently, behavior has yielded to a preoccupation with what other people think, and not what is best for us.

We are heaped in the rational, the cognitive and the linear, in the quantitative grab bag of popular culture, in that which is approved by society at large. Now this is compounded with the Internet that has competing platforms that are united in their ambition to define every term of our existence. No religion ever enjoyed such power and this is undisguised corporate power.

We are mainly instinctive animals operating at an evolutionary level with that “outer layer” (in Brooks’ words), instead of paying much attention to that buried “inner layer” of the unconscious. Most of the drivers that control our behavior reside in the "inner layer." This finds most of us self-estranged operating 24/7 compulsively on the "outer layer," or mainly on automatic pilot. This was the case with this matronly well-meaning checkout clerk at Walmart.

Theologian Paul Tillich would have a slightly different take on this. He would say this women cannot say “no” to her son because as much as she thinks she has suffered she has not suffered enough to know herself.

He would claim that if she had suffered enough she would realize that if her son became hostile to her for saying “no,” she would have no problem with it. On the other hand, if her friends and family were equally unsympathetic to her, this might cause her great distress. Should that occur, then it would be clear what they thought about her was more important than what she thought about herself.

Tillich would insist that only when people have moments of intense suffering, which is psychological suffering, and not physical suffering, then and only then do they finally discover that they are not the person they thought themselves to be. It is then that the mask melts away and they experience being one with themselves, alone, self-accepting and self-aware, and have no trouble whatsoever saying “no.”

Should you think this is a hypothetical proposition, you only have to ask my children, who are now in their mature years to find out that I am a legendary practitioner of “no.” They are all doing just find knowing that when push comes to shove they had better lift themselves off the turf than look elsewhere for aid. Self-reliance as with self-acceptance is key. Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay Self-Reliance (1841) suggests:

“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

If we could, we would like to see this nice lady be blessed with this ability to say “no” when it suits her, but each of us has to find this out for ourselves on our own, and of course, most of us never do. So, we have the pampered society of sons and daughters like this couple that has thoughtlessly destroyed the integrity of this woman’s home and life as if it were their right.

NOTES

[1] James D. Watson, “DNA: The Secret of Life,” Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2003; “The Double Helix: The Classic Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA,” Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1997; “The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, New American Library, New York, 1968; Sigmund Brouwer, “Double Helix” (a novel), Word Publishing, Dallas, 1995.
[2] David Brooks, “The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement,” Random House, New York, 2911, p. 165.
[3} Ibid., pp. 165-166

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares:

THE SUBTEXT OF LIFE AND ITS MEANING

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 30, 2009

© September 14, 2015

REFERENCE

This is a morsel from a book I am now writing, Self-Confidence: The Key to Health and Happiness.  The book uses the diagnostic tool The Fisher Paradigm©™ as its guide: Personality Profile (Person), Geographic Profile (Place) and Demographic Profile (Thing).  It is progressing well.  I hope to have it available on Kindle (www.amazon.com) before Christmas as an e-book.   

“There is general denial of the subtext of life. It is contained in a kind of culture that exists apart from the kind transmitted by schools and universities, a kind of culture that once flourished in typical neighborhoods across the country, but is now gone. It helped to stem lawlessness, greed, corruption and other social diseases. It was a kind of social resistance that is lacking today, something upheld by average citizens, but by people in authority as well. There was a subtext of restrain undefined, unwritten, unspoken, but nonetheless felt, practiced and experienced.

“Today, the gap between people’s dreams and experience is too large. People have resorted to living life on the edge, running without thinking, on automatic pilot in the rhythm of the content and context of things without a sense of restrain or penalty.

“We see this in general apathy as people react to the lead stories on television nightly news and in the headlines of morning newspapers regarding murder, mayhem, rape, fraud, and malfeasance with irritations but little more. It is the ghost in the room and not the elephant.

“The mind is homeless. It lacks roots. Most people aren’t from where they came. A kind of isolation from a sense of place and space breaks people down and leaves them untethered. Easily forgotten is that shameful acts are committed by people who are wounded human beings.

“Once upon a time, they were children, little ones running down the street at the start of school with their backpacks bouncing in cadence to their happy feet. They were on their way to school and on their way out into life. One wonders watching this parade if there goes a thief, a wife beater, an addict, a drug dealer, a murderer, a rapist, an embezzler, a gang member, a prostitute, a pimp, or some other drag on society, someone on the fringe that will garner those lead stories that we essentially ignore.

“Is this predetermined? Quite the opposite. But only if people use their intelligence and good will to get beyond surface issues of class and race, status and wealth, education and profession, immigration and ethnicity, religion and ideology, language and culture to consider the subtext of life to uncover what destroys social restrain and how to repair the damage.

“The world gets better or worse one person at a time. Apathetic or psychopathic behavior occurs because people are not acquainted with the subtext of their own lives and therefore are enslaved to surface issues. It was the same a hundred years ago and is likely to be so a hundred years hence.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., “Fragments of a Philosophy” (unpublished)

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares a chapter of a book now being written:

 WHEN MEN WON'T WORK AND THE WOMEN WHO CARRY THEM!

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

© May 19, 2011

© August 3, 2015

A generation ago, when the Feminist Movement was in full swing, women came to view life through the feminist prism.  They campaigned for an Office of Gender Equity, insisting there was a gender bias favoring men, especially with regard to education.  What now seems like ancient history, in 1970, it was then observed:

·       While boys get higher scores in mathematics, girls get higher scores in reading and writing;

·       Boys in eighth grade are 50 percent more likely to repeat a grade, while boys in high school constitute 68 percent of the special education population;

·       Two thirds of female high school graduates go on to college, compared to 58 percent of male high school graduates.

·       Women were only 41 percent of all college graduates.

Regarding graduate education, in 1970:

·       Women receive 40 percent of all master’s degrees; today, two thirds of all master’s degree candidates and more than half of all master’s degree holders are women;

·       Women earned only 6 percent of all first professional degrees; by 1991 that figure had increased to 39 percent, and now hovers around 50 percent; then only 14 percent of all doctoral degrees went to women; by 1991 that figure this was up to 39 percent, while today it is pressing 50 percent.

·       The medical degree earned by women between 1970 and 1991 jumped from 8 percent to 36 percent.  By 1993, 42 percent of first-year medical students were women; today more than half of all medical students are women.

·       In 1970, 5 percent of women earned law degrees; by 1991, that figure was up to 40 percent, and today it is around 50 percent;

·       In 1970, women earned 1 percent of dental degrees compared with 32 percent in 1991, and today more than half first year dental students are women, and more than 40 percent have earned dental degrees;

·       Women today earn the majority of doctoral degrees in pharmacy and veterinary medicine.

The gender imbalance is even more pronounced for African American and Hispanic women.  In 1990, fully 62 percent of all bachelor’s degrees to African Americans went to women, while 55 percent of Hispanic students receiving bachelor’s degrees were women.  In 1990, the white student imbalance was 53 percent to 47 percent in favor of women.  It is even more pronounced today.

 BACKGROUND

On April 4, 2011, I wrote an article in longhand on my observations on men who refused to work and the women who support them.  I wrote it while waiting for my daughter at the eye clinic where she was operated on for a detached retina.  

On May 11, 2011, David Brooks, New York Times columnist, wrote a piece on the same subject, not speaking from empirical data but economic statistics.  Brooks insisted in his piece that energy defines us, and that we are becoming less energetic insofar as American males are concerned.

·       In 1954, 96 percent of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 were actively engaged in some kind of regular work.  Today, that number has slipped to 80 percent, whereas women, once only allowed to enter the workforce in small numbers in menial tasks have steadily increased in the last half-century.

·     According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States now lags behind all other G-7 nations in prime age men in the workforce.  Brooks says,

“More American men lack the emotional and professional skills they would need to contribute.”

Most startlingly, however, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 35 percent of American males are without high school diplomas whereas only 10 percent of men with college degrees are out of work.

Brooks becomes something of an apologist for structural changes in the economy, which although relevant, fails to get inside the fact that there are more idle men walking the streets of the United States than at any time since the Great Depression.  

Brooks sees the problem in terms of economics when it seems clear to me it has been a natural progression of the Feminist Movement as many American males feel emasculated by the soaring prominence of women who have “forgotten their place.”

James Burke and Robert Ornstein present an intriguing conceptual framework for this phenomenon in “The Axemaker’s Gift: A Double-Edged History of Human Culture” (1995).  

They argued that with each cultural change something is gained at the expense of something lost never to be experienced again.  

Half the world’s population is women.  Yet, prior to WWII, they had been given secondary and subjugated roles.  It was evident ten-years after WWII that American society wanted to put the genie back in the bottle, meaning working women, as displayed sixty years ago in Good Housekeeping Monthly (May 13, 1955):

“THE GOOD WIFE GUIDE!”

Has dinner ready, plans ahead, even the night before to have a delicious meal on time for her husband’s return.  This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking of him and are concerned about his needs.

Prepare yourself.  Take 15 minutes to rest so you’ll be refreshed when he comes home.  Touch up your make up, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh looking.

Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him.

Clear away the clutter.  Make one last trip around the house before he arrives.

Gather up schoolbooks, toys and papers and run a dust cloth over the furniture.

Over the cooler months of the year light a fire for him to unwind by.

Prepare the children.  See that they are clean, are not noisy, and eliminate all noise from vacuum cleaners to dryers.

Be happy to see him.

Greet him with a warm smile and show sincerity in your desire to please him.

Listen to him.  You may have dozens of important things to tell him, but this is not the moment.  Remember, his topics of interest are more important than yours.

Make the evening his.  Never complain if he comes home late, or goes out to dinner, or other places of entertainment without you.  Try to understand his stress.

Your goal is to make your home a place of peace, order and tranquility.

Don’t greet him with complaints and problems.

Don’t complain if he’s late or stays out all night.

Make him comfortable.  Have a cool or warm drink ready for him.

Arrange his pillows and offer to take his shoes off.

Don’t ask him about his actions or question his judgments or integrity.

A good wife always knows her place.

If this seems incredible today, this was the actual wifely social menu for the happy home after WWII.  

Good Housekeeping Monthly presented this itemized list with attractive smiling housewives decked out in stunning colors doing the cooking, baking, housecleaning, washing and drying, and ironing as if this was the ultimate joy to feminine fulfillment.  Women, however, didn’t buy into it from the get go.    

One of my aunts was a certified welder in a defense plant during the war, another aunt worked as a tool and die lath operator, and still another aunt was a machinist.  They didn’t leave the workforce after WWII, but worked in their important jobs until retirement. 

Seventy years later after the end of WWII in 1945, this fantasy retinue of selfless devotion is still the obsession of some men, as 20 percent of them, ages 25 to 54, aren’t working, or if working, not working full time, or in work they have been trained.  I know:

·       An attorney with several degrees including a doctor in jurisprudence who refuses to practice law full time, or when he does, to give free services to friends.  His family suffers for this indulgence, forcing his wife to work as a freelance model driving fifty, sixty or more miles for auditions while still being mother, housekeeper, cook, baker, and taxi service for her children's after school activities.  She is even expected to pick up her husband’s dry cleaning.

·       A father of two children sits at home strumming his guitar when he is able bodied except for suffering the carpal tunnel syndrome, a disorder acquired from overworking his hands performing the repetitive task of strumming the guitar all day long.  His wife cheerfully by default has become the family breadwinner.

·       A number of college graduates who have given up the effort to find work while living with their parents at home, the wife or girlfriend out busing tables in some restaurant or club.

Then there are women who would like to be home spending time with their children when their husbands are making a comfortable living for the family.  But that is not good enough.  These husbands feel their wives should be bringing in money, too, forgetting that being a wife and mother and housekeeper and family taxi service is a full time non-paying job.

·     Another couple has four preteen children in which the husband is a high school graduate and the wife a college graduate.   She is a dedicated mother feeling she cannot afford to take on a full time teaching position at this time in her children's lives.  So, besides being a full-time mother, she substitute teaches and cleans houses to make ends meet, while her husband refuses to leave a job that is, at best, only a part-time position and never brings in much income.

Women described here are treated in the manner of this 1955 Good Housekeeping Guide although none of them were yet born.  These husbands subscribe to the 1955 dictum, “a good wife knows her place.”  

What is not stated here, but every reader familiar with men of this ilk knows, is that these men, simply stated, are financial liabilities to their families.  They bury their sorrows in the neighborhood bar and smoke two or three packs of cigarettes a day.  Then they wonder why the family can never meet its financial obligations at the end of the week.  

 THE WALTER MITTY SYNDROME

Humorous James Thurber wrote a short story in 1939, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” which touched the collective American psyche denoting the ineffectual male who spends his time in heroic daydreams paying little attention to the real world.

Many of the men described above fit into the Walter Mitty Syndrome as they live in the world of “what if”:

·       Had I gotten the breaks I would have made something of myself.

·       Had I been born into a better situated family I would be better off now.

·       Had I gotten the breaks writing a song I might have had a career.

·       Had I married the right woman I would not have been dragged down to this.

·       Had I not had children I would not have had to struggle.

·       Had I gone into the military or the government I’d be retired by now with a great pension.

Men who don’t work are great daydreamers.  This is consistent with Thurber’s short story.  Walter Mitty would spend his day in a deep state of daydreaming imagining himself a fighter pilot during WWII, a world-class doctor, always someone far removed from what he was.

It was why in that eye clinic waiting for my daughter that I wrote this missive, which follows.

WHEN MEN WON’T WORK AND THE WOMEN WHO SUPPORT THEM

People in the 1970’s watched their families disintegrate as women increasingly carried the economic and emotional load.

Since then, women as wives and mothers not only do most of the work, but they are a taxi service for the demands of the family.  They carry their children to and fro, go to the grocery store, and dry cleaners for their husbands, and suffer the aggravations as well as the joys of their children.

They are the silent partners in the marital relationship, never in the know, until their husbands need a signature on a second or third mortgage.  Husbands make deals and then tell their wives after the fact.  It would never occur to these men that they needed wifely counseling.  They believe they are always in the know, see no reason to consult their wives and share the risks they have taken, and therefore often drive the family to ruin.   

Husbands scheme and daydream and find no need to consult their wives as they believe they possess superior minds and information.  They may have the information and good enough minds, but it is doubtful superior intelligence.  

In the 1950s, 80 percent of the top 10 percent high school graduates were women.  This was reversed during the same period for college.  Now, it is being reversed again as 80 percent of the top 10 percent college graduates in this new century are women.   

The nostalgia for the way it was hangs on.  Men have vision, women have insight.  Yet, women are often reduced to and treated as maids, housekeepers, nannies, chefs, waiters, dishwashers, launderers and supervisors of the children, keeping order and avoiding chaos with little allocated down time.

Again, in the 1950s, the situation was essentially independent of socioeconomic status, education, or social standing.  Families with the advantage of affluence, education, cultural enhancement, travel and social engagement were as likely as not to display male dominating attributes.

The only time attention was brought to this matter was when women were coming apart, or in failing health, and therefore were forced to slow down or stop their demanding schedule altogether.  Women persevered, for the most part, in the most trying circumstances.  

How say you of this matter in the 21st century?

PRIDE ON THE LINE

Cultural bias would imply that I am addressing the dregs of society.  Not true.  Men who won’t work can be physicians in their forties who won’t practice medicine, attorneys who won’t practice law, and carpenters who won’t apply their craft, and yes, poorly educated men who have lost their safe jobs in automobile manufacturer, chemical processing, oil refineries, or other previously safe jobs for the unskilled and under educated.  These workers refuse to suffer the embarrassment of going back to night school or junior college to learn twenty-first century skills.

These men could be practicing teachers who fail to engage students who challenge their methods, authority or the relevance of their knowledge; engineers unwilling to adjust to the digital demands of the new engineering; and managers who refuse to acknowledge and adapt to the power shift from position power to knowledge power now primarily possessed by professional workers.

These men are caught in a time warp in which their authority was once infallible whether they were doctors, teachers, or managers.  Seventy years ago, few had the gumption to challenge their authority or views.  Now, these men bask in nostalgic pride with excuses for why they have given up and given out.

Men across society at every socioeconomic level have been dropping off and dropping out of the workforce because it has changed and they cannot cope with or adjust to the change.  What do they do?

Many become couch potatoes.  These men love to follow violent sports vicariously such as professional wrestling, football and ice hockey.  It gives them a buzz to exercise their Walter Mitty fixation.  They identify with these combative warriors who sacrifice mind, body and sense for their entertainment.  

These same men spend a small fortune for season tickets and sports paraphernalia often not having a budget to make ends meet. Still others spend the little money they have gambling on professional sport teams they watch on television.

The problem is that men in general like to soar like birds and identify with those who successfully break free of the herd by demonstrable athletic prowess while having trouble seeing over their belt buckles for the protrusion of their stomachs. 

Women like to feel the soft earth under their feet and deal pragmatically with the possible and probable without complaint.  

Men applaud physical courage, and have since the times of ancient Greece.  

Women respect moral courage and confront life stoically with humility, not pride.  

That is why the educated housewife can find her way to cleaning houses while her under educated husband mopes about complaining about everything while doing nothing. 

To be fair, some with initiative read self-help books, attend self-help workshops or self-help seminars and think they are engaged.  They are not.  They are fooling themselves.

Self-help publishing is a post-WWII invention and $billion industry.  It has become something of a panacea as self-help books have little to do with changing circumstances, and a lot to do with making authors rich as it plays a hypnotic rhapsody on the reader’s delicate psyche.

Such men are suspended in permanent adolescence daydreaming their way through life writing music, strumming guitars, or doing anything that doesn't give off the scent of work.  

They are Walter Mittys to the tee, fantasizing for the quick score, the perfect franchise, standing on acres of diamonds without a care in the world, while their inherent disability receives scant attention.  They subconsciously spend their lives looking for answers in all the wrong places.

Others eat and drink themselves to a state of permanent inertia.  They deplete their limited energy to the point that they couldn’t look for work if they wanted to.  They are casualties of Western civilization’s deification of men and denigration of women over the centuries.  The irony and paradox is that this all starts with the nurturing practices of mothers.  

Men born after the Good Housekeeping 1955 Guide for the “good wife” are the spoiled brats of our culture and their sponsors are their mothers.  In a paradoxical and counter dependent way, mothers continue to enslave their daughters to accountability and liberate their sons from responsibility.

Yet, these same women that are nursemaids to their husbands and children are often ridiculed rather than appreciated.  This is especially true when these women use their limited free time to go back to school to better themselves while their men are not so inclined.  In my career, I’ve counseled hundreds of women who suffered this paradoxical dilemma.

THE DOUBLE EDGED SWORD, OR WHAT HAS BEEN LOST

The generation of the Great Depression entered maturity in the 1950s and survived because they were small in number with unlimited opportunity in a post-World War II climate.  

They had been schooled in scarcity, and learned to live with little.  When they came to maturity, they failed to teach these same lessons to their children.  Not only were these parents guilty of this, but teachers, the religious, managers, and leaders as well.  

An insouciant society developed without guidance or direction, and therefore without wisdom.

The irony is that children of the 1950s had more freedom, more creative license, but were well acquainted with the Darwinism of the survival of the fittest.  

It was a microclimate conducive to the development of leaders through pain and struggle, a fluid environment with nothing written in concrete.  Adults and children alike were familiar with experimentation as they had no other choice.

The generation of the 1950s, essentially the pre-television era, lived within their means, didn’t buy expensive houses, or drive fancy cars, nor did they dress or attempt to mimic the rich and famous, but lived within themselves, and they prospered.

The societal train, however, went off the tracks in the 1960s.  

Parents attempted to save their children from the pain and struggle they had experienced, pampering them to excess.  One of the casualties was that school became a failed factory and a combat war zone with little opportunity for education. 

Young men of the 1960s burned their draft cards, refused to serve their country, fled to Canada, created chaos on college campuses, or retreated to Haight Asbury at Golden Gate State Park in California to drift into a psychedelic high and hedonistic lifestyle in defiance of the Protestant Work Ethic and the American establishment. 

This hippie generation felt sexually repressed and looked for liberation in free love, but instead gave birth to the United States of Anxiety.  This spawned the psychotherapy industry that is still with us.  Instead of being a palliative, psychotherapy became iatrogenic, the cure being worse than the disease.

THE POWER OF DENIAL

People who came to maturity in the 1950s, now parents, were not prepared for a world that had caught up with the United States economically and technologically.

1950 style parents were drunk with success, and had little time for child rearing. Their children were allowed to their own devices and became essentially their own parents as their parents were seldom home both working to keep up with the Jones.

Children forever have invented their own play, but the world of 1960s was a very different world than the 1930s, something most parents refused to acknowledge.  It was a much more dangerous place.

At the same time, the inchoate power shift to women was underway.  Men were being pushed aside in leadership, scholarship and professional acumen, as women climbed the ladder to be the majority in college, whatever their ethnicity or profession.  

Women have not been deterred by the fact they make only 75 percent as much as men doing the same work.

Nor are women biased for being treated as baby factories for they are working their way up the corporate pyramid to the boardrooms and into the highest offices of government and corporate society.

 RIGHT BRAIN, LEFT BRAIN

In this digital age, we are finding the right brain, the so-called “feminine brain” is a powerful and necessary complement to the left-brain, the so-called “masculine brain.”

The key to the problem solving is not primarily aggressive action, but a more appropriate response to chronic problems.  Likewise, the key to economic health is no longer the competitive verve, but the spirit of cooperation.

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Although rational cognitive thinking is still important, intuitive wisdom and the use of the affect have come into prominence (see David Brook’s “The Social Animal,” 2011), as the affect and intuitive is an important match to the cognitive.  In that same vein, analysis need not lead to paralysis if suitable attention is given to synthesis.

No one has been more energetic in exposing the limits to pure Socratic thinking, or linear logic than Edward de Bono in such books as “Lateral Thinking” (1977) and “Parallel Thinking” (1994).

Women are inclined to problem solve conditionally when dealing with contradictory situations, which are common to their daily experience.

Aware of their biological clock, delayed gratification is programmed into the female psyche as well as the genes.  The necessary investment of time, patience and care are familiar feminine territory.  Stated another way, women have their feet solidly on the ground while men prefer to soar to avoid the detritus of normal everyday life.

The decline and fall of men has been accelerated by making excuses in perpetuity why men won’t work, won’t study, won’t get off their behinds and do something useful.  Unfortunately, exacerbating the problem, women still attempt to carry their men as if they were dependent children at the age of twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, or older.

Ergo, women can be accused of complicating the picture.  By carrying their men who refuse to work, absorbing physical, mental, and emotional abuse, they are acting as if the punishment is deserved.  It doesn't take a crystal ball to imagine if the situation were reversed that men would walk out. That is still something that seldom happens with women.

WHAT CAN BE DONE WITH MEN WHO WON’T WORK?

The short answer is for women to tell their men to get off their behinds and look for work or get lost!  

If this sound like tough love, so be it.  Everyone has interests even those currently stuck.  One of the problems is that few men follow their bliss but instead chase the buck doing what pays the most invariably landing in something that has little appeal to them.  Women have been locked into a comparable prison for centuries, but continue to thrive despite repressed bitterness. 

Men are not made of such firm substance as women.  That is my conclusion.  I know a number of men in their fifties who have the maturity of a ten-year-old.  How should they deal with this?

Interest may be kindled in volunteering at school, church or in a community project, or around some favorite activity such as music, sports, or some other social arena.  In this age, men could find a way of making a living at home surfing the Internet.

It would help, too, if they would give up cigarettes and booze or tickets to sporting events especially when they can’t afford these pacifiers.  

At the very least, they could become house husband.  They could be cleaning the house, painting, doing the grocery shopping, going to the cleaners, doing the laundry, taking the kids to and from school, and to youth events.  The shoe is now on the other foot, and remember, the person who has the coin has the power.

These men often keep their women out of the loop as to how they spend their money.  Now, they can experience a little of their own medicine.

Here is the rub.  I’ve talked to countless women who never had a clue as to how their husbands spent the family income, never understood why they had to sign papers without prior conversations on the investment, or a second or third mortgage on their house, never were asked if they would like to go to this or that event, but assumed they would go to satisfy their husband’s commitment without question or protest.

Now, these men who won’t work and are not bringing in the bacon still have wives who feel obliged to get permission from them to do this or that with their hard earned money, something they never experienced when their men were making the majority of the coin.

Moreover, women are reluctant to take legal action against deadbeat husbands and fathers, blaming themselves for the anxiety in the family.  Deadbeat dads are good at being abusive of their wives the mothers of their children.

Eventually, given the stress and strain of carrying these men, given the unlikely chance anything will ever change, these women have to decide whether they would be better off without these men.

There are many families who have gone through more than one generation of deadbeat dads, men who would work only for premium wages or not at all, men who were alcoholics and abused their wives and children psychologically if not physically, and women who were willing to put up with this nonsense because they knew no other.

In the last quarter century, the plush jobs in the automotive and steel industry have evaporated.  Generation after generation of workers with high school diplomas or less were conditioned to make $50,000 to $75,000 a year in unskilled jobs, and to retire with pensions of $40,000 with full medical benefits.  The boilerplate for this workforce still exists but the jobs do not.

Then there are men who soared during the booming 1990s, and have suffered major setbacks, finding themselves in deep financial trouble, unable to cope much less work.  They need help but they are unwilling to seek counseling.  Many are educated in law, medicine, engineering and education.  They are the walking wounded that are part of this problem and need help not criticism.

The world of the Big Easy, be it Detroit or Gary or Seattle, or New Orleans, or somewhere else is gone.  We are a declining nation in a world that has not only caught up with us but is passing us.  We cannot complain our way back to prominence by denying this reality. 

I’ve known engineers making six-figure incomes who were let go when high tech companies downsized.  Some started new businesses using their skills, many waited for the upturn to return.  They are still waiting.  

I know of one engineer who was given a quarter million dollar separation package from IBM, and went through it in two years.  He has never had a stable income since.  I would like to think this an isolated case, but I don’t think so.

Men who won’t work are not a mirage.  It is indicative of our times and a profile too familiar.  We are aghast that unemployment hovers around 9 percent, when I think it is closer to 18 percent, when you take in part-time workers, and workers no longer looking for work.

Economists write books with economic solutions when I see the problem basically a behavioral and psychological one.

These are not bad men who won’t work.  These are men who need help.  I’m not sure we have the tools to do that job.  The psychological and psychiatric professions are mainly explanatory factories.  They present an interesting vocabulary to identity maladies and an equally interesting vocabulary of remedies.  Nothing changes.  The solution will evade discovery if the problem is not definitive identified in useful operational terms.

For wont of being misunderstood, I would suggest the problem is mainly a spiritual issue that has little to do with mechanistic algorithms and paradigms.  It is the soul of society that is sick.

We have lost our moral compass and our way.  We need help to crawl out of the ditch of despair and take quiet inventory of where we are, how we got there, and where we want to go.