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