The Peripatetic Philosopher ponders:

The Coming Revolution – The End of Corpocracy and the Emergence of the New Worker!

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

© December 15, 2015

REFERENCE:

To a trusted colleague I passed the idea of publishing in an e-book some of my journal articles over the past few decades that relate to the decline of management and its credo of corpocracy and the emergence of a new worker.


HE WRITES:

Are you sure you understand the worker? Wouldn't you be speaking their language if you did?

Do you know the name Lech Walensa? Sure you do. How did he manage to gain the confidence of the workers he championed? I think he convinced them that they really could succeed, and that by sticking together (solidarity), they had power.

You believe, but does your principal audience believe? Collectively? Gustav le Bon, where are you? Or Pied Piper, where are you? Hey, could Trump be recruited to lead the Proletariat to the Promised Land? After all, his only principle is to be the center of attention. Or, could Gloria Steinem inspire women to take the lead on behalf of men and women? Sure she could. She loves crusading. Any way you cut it, a champion needs to step forward.

End of Corpocracy? Great idea. It seems the managerial class is so in love with the power that anything less than a revolution can change things. So I like your idea of a revolution, but as a method, not an end result.

Here in Alberta, we elected a Labor government back in May. You wouldn't believe the shrill outcry of our corporate controlled news media. An all-out ideological war is under way here. If you can imagine the State of Texas electing a labor government, that's basically what's happened here.

We are Texas North, but the electorate voted impulsively against corporatism, being extremely angry at the Conservatives.

It's interesting to see what they're saying in the newspapers about our fledgling new government. It has flushed the conflict out in the open, these pretend capitalists who give themselves so much credit for their wealth reveal their true colors.

Even though the new government has only been in power for a couple of months, every conceivable evil in the world is blamed on the NDP. That includes the low price of oil of course.

The day after the new government brought in their first budget, about three months after the election, two major corporations, Shell Canada and Husky Energy simultaneously announced major layoffs and project cancellations, cynically linking the despised government budget directly to losses of jobs in the public mind.

Now, concerning the title of your journal collection, I wonder if the term corpocracy will resonate with people. It seems ironic to me that knowing you are politically conservative, you want to promote a profoundly socialistic concept.

William McDonald Wallace wrote a book in the 1970's, "How To Save Free Enterprise", which dealt with the problems created by bureaucratic work structures. He identified the problem as what he called the BSO; bureaucratic social order.

His insight was that by organizing work in bureaucratic fashion, the unrecognized by-product was the destruction of supportive social systems. His solution? You've seen it. My point is that this issue has been kicked around for a long long time, probably a lot longer than we know. Maybe a hundred years from now people will be saying much the same thing as you are saying today.

The question is what does it take to trigger constructive permanent change, to move people to action? Idealists agree, there's a problem; that there has to be a better way. 

You trust the workers, Dr. Fisher.  They are sheep.

Your trusted friend


DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Wow! You are wound up! Good. That is healthy.

Yes, workers are sheep. That is how they have been programmed.

Management and those in power and control of the economy trust that they will remain so.

That said there was the American and French Revolution of common people some three hundred years ago. And if pundits and prognosticators are correct, more change has occurred in the past thirty years than the previous three hundred.

That, alone, would seem portend for dramatic change if not drastic disruption, or a recipe for revolution.

Regarding Lech Walensa, when I was in Poland I asked people what they thought of him. He was president at the time.

People said he was a good propagandist but a poor president. They had a much higher regard for their own Polish pope, Paul II.

Walensa when he visited the United States, said, "I have noticed when visiting the West, a certain illness, and I call this the illness of stabilization."

Interesting, Poland as well as the West suffers the same illness to this day.

WORKERS HAVE NOWHERE ELSE TO TURN!

About workers, I write not to lead them or to have them follow me, but for them to pay attention, be aware and to take charge, themselves. It can be no other way.

I am not surprised that my title, THE COMING REVOLUTION -- THE END OF CORPOCRACY AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE NEW WORKER confounds you slightly.

Yes, as a moral philosopher, I suppose I am conservative, but from that point it gets a bit murky. Am I a conservative with socialistic leanings? I don’t think so. Labels have never rested too well on me. I am a provocateur.

What is true about me is that I have never forgotten my roots, never forgotten how Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the mess left by my Iowa Republican President Herbert Hoover, and gave men such as my da some level of dignity with work during THE GREAT DEPRESSION.

Roosevelt took office in 1933 cutting pay of government workers, cutting government spending by 15 percent, insuring people's deposits in banks against losses in the banking system.

He instituted the AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ACT (1933) that paid farmers to limit crops, forced employers to collective bargain with trade unions, and effectively ended Prohibition by authorizing the production of 3.2 beer before the 21st Amendment to the Constitution was written.

FDR also created public works known as WORKS PROJECT ADMINISTRATION or WPA, which gave work to people like my da, and to others with the CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS or CCC.

Roosevelt's New Deal of the three R's -- relief for the poor and the unemployed; recovery of the economy to pre-Depression status, and reform of the financial system -- did not take the United States out of the Great Depression. WWII did. But it was a bold move to restore the psychic confidence of the nation.

I write so much about confidence because confidence is not a thing. Confidence is a mindset. Anything is possible with such a mindset, and nothing is possible without it.

I've read books on FDR and he freely admits he made up things as he went along. He betrayed his patrician class and embraced the common man, not always wisely but completely.

This is where the irony of my politics and economics comes in.

Neither the Democratic nor Republican Party understands FDR's legacy.

President Ronald Reagan was something of a Democrat in the White House as a Republican President. Yet, he didn't quite understand Roosevelt's "three R's," nor has either party ever since.

There is no difference in either party today when it comes to lobbyists, special interests, and the one-tenth of one percenters who quietly from a distance control the economy.

The whore of the one-tenth of one percenters is elected officials of both parties, while the pimp is the management class that does its heavy lifting and gets all the attention.

Apparently, it is the same in Canada and most of the Western World.

Our great universities and the scientific establishment falls in line with this construction because they depend on the financial support of the one-tenth of one percenters.

Now, we have one of their kind brazenly running for President of the United States in Donald J. Trump, claiming he has bought most of those on the stage with him, and those not, in the other political party, especially Hillary Clinton.

If this is not a recipe for revolution, I don't know what is. But with me "revolution" is more modest, more evolutionary than socially disruptive.

Over my long career, I have watched able men and women, acquire education, step into the working world, and pledge that once they have acquired a modicum of influence that they would behave differently than their bosses. It has not happened. They behave precisely the same or they disappear from the payroll.

Perhaps, I am one of the few exceptions who didn't change, didn't join the club. For whatever reason, I have always remembered my roots and my loyalties to my da and workers like him.

Once people who rise into management acquire status, special privileges, perks, bonuses, club membership among the elite, it is easy for them to forget from whence they came. They are thus inclined to deny their roots, the struggle of their families, and the origin of their idealism.

For the past twenty five years, or since I have devoted myself full-time to writing, commencing with WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES (1991), I have been relentless in attempting to get the worker's attention, but alas, without success.

These published essays that I am considering to republish in an e-book are a record of that constant endeavor to bring attention to this matter.

Keep thinking and challenging the conventional wisdom.

The Peripatetic Philosopher ponders a conundrum:

The Difficulty in Understanding the Donald J. Trump Phenomenon!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. 

© December 10, 2015

By an interesting coincidence, Adolf Hitler’s rise to power came when it was my time to come into the world. Now, when it is my time to exit the world, a phenomenon not unlike that of Adolf Hitler, who created a new model for the rise to power, finds Donald J. Trump frustrating those committed to a behaving corporate society being at a loss on what to do.

The Trump Phenomenon involves a bit of history, a bit of denial of the significance of sweeping change, and the dislocation of our individual and collective souls when it comes to “science and religion.” Whenever there is mass confusion rising to hysteria, society experiences a watershed moment. Are we on the cusp of such a moment?

This current phenomenon of Donald J. Trump cannot be explained away with conventional wisdom any more than people could fathom the rise of Hitler in 1933.

Fifty years ago, I read William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), which was a comprehensive historical interpretation of the Nazi era, positing that German history logically proceeded from the Protestantism of Martin Luther to Adolf Hitler along with the brutal rise of capitalism to replace feudalism.  In other words, it was the dawn of corporate society.

  

Hitler’s ascension to power was an expression of Germany’s national character, not totalitarianism as an ideology that was internationally fashionable in the 1930s.  He captured the mind of the time as Trump is capturing the mind of his time, which is mainly a mind out to lunch with reality.   

  

Much is made of Germany’s humiliation at Versailles at the end of WWI, but little note is made of the fact that most nations of the West then pledged blind obedience to temporal rulers be they in democratic or autocratic systems. 

  

This was especially true of Great Britain, despite its constitutional monarchy democracy, with the imperial majesty of empire extending to every corner of the globe, where the peoples of those regions were exposed to despotic control and exploitation with no viable avenue of opposition.

  

Germany in particular put a high premium on servility and allegiance to authority as the most prominent of Germanic virtues.  What is not so commonly acknowledged is that American academia, scholarship, industry and nationalism subscribed to a similar boilerplate but under the guise of constitutional representative democracy.  It was the infallibility of authority across the board.  

Adolf Hitler stepped into the confusion of his time to invent a new method of acquiring power.  He aggressively campaigned across Germany flying to every principality of the German nation, holding rallies and using the radio, newspapers and magazines as they had never been used before to promulgate his charismatic message of Germany being victimized by the West with him as Germany’s savior.   

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY REMAIN

 THE SAME!

We are quick to note Hitler’s excesses but not our own as there was little doubt in the United States who was in charge and who was not.  The “captains of industry” controlled the economy, and therefore essentially the nation.

Futurist Alvin Toffler shattered that convenient boilerplate with “Future Shock” (1970).   He explained why the emerging industrial giant, America, did what it did out of self-interest rather than humanitarian reasons.  This included the need to embark on compulsory education as the 19^th century gave way to the 20^th century. 

American industry needed workers who could read and write and do simple mathematical calculation.  It also needed these workers to behave as disposable parts to that gigantic machine. 

This new boilerplate had students matriculating from five-years-of-age through their teenage years.  In addition to learning these skills, they were conditioned to behave as obedient, polite, submissive, passive, reactive, complacent and compliant students to corporate authority.  This authority and compliance included parents, teachers, preachers, the police and politician.   

They were meant to be cogs in the wheel of progress and programmed to do, not to think.  This worked surprisingly well through WWII, but not after, as the 1960s and 1970s soon revealed.

Toffler explains:

  

"Society needs people who take care of the elderly and who know how to be compassionate and honest. Society needs people who work in hospitals. Society needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they’re emotional, they’re affectional. You can’t run the society on data and computers alone."

 Psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy gets inside this need to exposing the obvious:

  

"Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to unlearn …

  

"The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction — how to teach himself."

  

Yet, despite this advice, here in 2015, as I have attempted to continuously show in a constant stream of books and articles in the genre of the professional worker, students and workers alike continue to be managed, motivated, mobilized and compensated as if we are still the blue collar worker era of pre-WWII. 

That obliging blue collar worker was programmed to do, not to think, to behave, not to challenge, to comply, not to initiate. 

  

Toffler and Gerjuoy are suggesting a radical change from doing to thinking, from being obedient to authority to taking charge. 

  

Yet, seventy years after WWII, the working world is still not designed to fulfill that need, or that boilerplate, and therefore society is not yet ready for this new human being.

 In Toffler’s “The Third Wave” (1980), he becomes more specific describing three types of societies, based on the concept of "waves" with wave pushing the older wave and society and culture aside. 

 The “First Wave” was the society of the agrarian revolution after the first hunter gathering culture.

 The “Second Wave” was the industrial revolution that transpired between the late 17^th century and mid-20^th century.

  

The main component of the “Second Wave” was the nuclear family and the compulsory and compliant educational system, and the birth of corporate society.  

Toffler writes:

 “The Second Wave Society was of an industrial base on mass production, mass distribution and mass recreation, mass entertainment, and ultimately the mass of weapons of mass destruction. 

“You combine those things with standardization, centralization, and concentration of resources with synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy.”

 In my writing, I call it “corpocracy” (see Six Silent Killers, 2015 or The Worker, Alone! 2016).  

  

The “Third Wave” is the post-industrial postmodernity society.  According to Toffler, since the late 1950s, most nations have been moving away from a “Second Wave Society” into what he calls a “Third Wave Society,” one based on actionable knowledge as a primary resource.

 Tofller’s description of this super-industrial society (notice he still is stuck on industrialization) dovetails with current concepts of an “Information Age, “Space Age,” and “Technetronic Age,” or a scientific-technological revolution.

 Toffler and his futuristic cohorts predict a demassification, diversity, knowledge-based society in which production, and the acceleration of change is non-linear and can go backwards, forwards and sideways.  In other words, this finds unpredictability and contradiction endemic to the future. 

Modern man is uncomfortable with this as well as with complexity.   He wants predictable redress of problems with simplistic and understandable strategies.   

  

Donald Trump comes to the fore as did Hitler some eighty-two years ago with lifestyles supplanting living styles and subcultures exploding into all kinds of insanities. 

  

The contemporary mind has given way to pedestrian boredom. 

People have become so numbed and dumb witted by the constant cacophony of dissembling authoritative dribble emanating from parents, teachers, preachers, the police and politicians that little of that dulling noise registers. 

 People attempt to escape this prison with outrageous dress, music, and antics to shock when the collective conscience is beyond shocking.     

We have become a Teflon society led by Teflon figures in mass customization to the norm of “fast food” McDonalds to “on the cheap” Walmart.  Metadata has replaced the personal, as death and taxes no longer is the constant fear but not belonging.  The Donald appears in this climate.

Is Donald Trump an aberration?  Or is he the next nightmare that collective society will endure?  No one knows.  No one took the little German corporal seriously until he changed the world.  What will be the legacy of the Donald?

The reality is that people are tired of being tired, tired of being told what to think, believe and value, tired of being told what words and ideas mean, tired of being designated Democrats or Republicans, conservatives or liberals, Catholics or Protestants, Moslems or Jews, tired of living in this Wizard of Oz time.

While the Donald plays on our fears, and our hunger for the simplistic, he stays quiet on religion.  Religion brought the Puritans to America, and religion has always been fundamental to the American conscience.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Albert Einstein thoughts about religion appeared in the New York Times Magazine on November 9, 1930.  Here is what he had to say (in part):

Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and longing are the motive force behind all human endeavor and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present themselves to us.

Now what are the feelings and needs that have led men to religious thought and belief in the widest sense of the words? A little consideration will suffice to show us that the most varying emotions preside over the birth of religious thought and experience. With primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions - fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, and death.

Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal connections is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates illusory beings more or less analogous to itself on whose wills and actions these fearful happenings depend. Thus one tries to secure the favor of these beings by carrying out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition handed down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make them well disposed toward a mortal.

In this sense I am speaking of a religion of fear. This, though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the formation of a special priestly caste which sets itself up as a mediator between the people and the beings they fear, and erects a hegemony on this basis. In many cases a leader or ruler or a privileged class whose position rests on other factors combines priestly functions with its secular authority in order to make the latter more secure; or the political rulers and the priestly caste make common cause in their own interests.

The social impulses are another source of the crystallization of religion. Fathers and mothers and the leaders of larger human communities are mortal and fallible. The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts men to form the social or moral conception of God.

This is the God of Providence, who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes; the God who, according to the limits of the believer's outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or of the human race, or even or life itself; the comforter in sorrow and unsatisfied longing; he who preserves the souls of the dead. This is the social or moral conception of God …….

The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.

The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.

How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.

In his quiet way, Einstein, a deeply religious man, but not one of a specific denomination although born a Jew, projects the mind to the cosmic and religion with it. 

In reading Max Jammer’s “Einstein and Religion” (1999), you get a sense of how controversial was Einstein’s stand eighty five years ago.  Perhaps today it is food for the soul.

Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that resulted in the making of the atomic bomb.  He did so because of Nazism and the Holocaust.  Am I placing candidate Donald Trump in the same sense of Hitler and Nazism? 

Not at all.  I am contemplating a conundrum.  Roman Catholic Cardinal Pacelli, a devout man, was Nuncio of Germany (1920-1939) during Hitler’s rise to power.  He became Pope Pius XII in March 1939 with Hitler invading Poland in September of that same year, igniting WWII.

Historians claim this cardinal and pope didn’t know what to make of the rise of Hitler, or what to do once he had come to power.   The current populace may have its stomach of conventional politicians, but at least it knows what it gets with them.  The Donald is another story.   

The Peripatetic Philosopher asks and answers:

 Amazon's Kindle Library (2015): $9.99

WHY READ “SELF-CONFIDENCE"? 

Self-Confidence is about being in charge, taking control of one’s life. It is not about how to win friends and influence others, but how to have that cache over oneself.

Self-Confidence is a mindset, not a ballyhooed coping mechanism. In other words, this is a different perspective on a familiar, but much misunderstood term, “self-confidence.”

Books that promise “power” or “influence” over others place the focus outside what is manageable, the self. If we have a center energized by a moral compass, we have power and influence because we are in charge of ourselves.

Science and technology have directed us away from the “essential self” with analytics, statistics and algorithms reducing the individual to a data collection to be incessantly probed and bombarded by subliminal stimuli.

We dance to the corporate mantra of “progress” at the expense of our internal governor of self-awareness, self-direction and self-control. We have lost our moral compass and our way, and for this, we are not happy campers.

“We have lost touch with touch.” We have alienated ourselves from ourselves as individuals in the most intimate ways. We have become an imitation of our authentic self at the heavy cost of stability and emotional survival.

Self-Confidence deals with this so that we can ride the good times and bad times with a perspective and understanding.

Self-Confidence enables us to make good choices, to understand ourselves and others with tolerance and compassion. We are ready to take charge, ready to lead.

With self-awareness, the cognitive mind is now married to the intuitive mind to solve problems with intuitive as well as rational wisdom.

Indeed, with Self-Confidence, we can change the daily headlines of print and electronic network news to an abundance of positive stories and experiences because we are far less conflicting.

The intuitive mind is prominent in Self-Confidence with its preference for cooperation to the competitive combative cognitive mind. With this, there is now room for our spiritual or non-quantitative side to emerge.

These are dangerous times. Yet, we go forward with tools designed for another time. But we have a protective shield. It is our reptilian brain that has been with us since the dawn of the Cro-Magnon man.

The reptilian brain is engaged when we have a feeling of apprehension when around certain people. Feelings calibrate a threatening situation long before the cognitive mind is engaged. Feelings trigger the prehensile mind in a split second to respond to a threatening situation. Feelings tell us: this is not right, this is not good, this is not what it seems, this is not for me.

Self-Confidence is designed to show a way to get beyond the “pathology of normalcy” to enjoy a meaningful and productive life.