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)