Reader Advises on Utopia
Re:
Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 18, 2016
READER WRITES:
Quite profound philosophy. Thinking in sets of attributes comes to mind. Think Venn diagrams.
This is my take on Utopia. Take heart, you have experienced Utopia. Fleeting, perhaps, but genuine enough. The only valid source of description about Utopia is from those who have successfully engineered Utopias and those who have lived there. The mathematical physics of set theory apply in full to the collection of behavioral patterns comprising Utopia.
Utopia is not the fantasy concoction of a non-participant, such as Sir Thomas More. Credentials plus guesswork does not validate Utopia. If it’s not auditable in situ, like dystopia, the object is not Utopia. If it was the paradigm of Utopia, it would have been implemented and self-sustaining.
Because of the force fields of natural law and the persistence of human nature, there is only dystopia and Utopia. All combinations are too transient to be called fleeting. There is no status quo or business as usual. Everyone is concerned with making things better.
Utopia is not a geographical place featuring Utopian architecture and cruise-ship services. The ingredients to configure and operationalize a Utopia are omnipresent. That Utopia can be shown to exist within every social system is the theme of the pilgrimage.
Utopia is an operationalized paradigm of social system functioning that requires no change to the as-received architecture. It is a scheme of relationships and attitudes based upon the “prisoner of position” principle. It meets the benchmark requirements of immortality established by Chris Argyris and the Theory “Y” criteria of Douglas McGregor.
When you are living in utopia your experience, through your cognition, constantly sends you messages that you are indeed in utopia. You know you’re in Utopia by the activities going on dedicated to maintenance and vigilance, compared to the working goals reported by those that happily do the necessary self-correction work. There are no attempts to ignore human nature or defy natural law.
In Utopia, everyone knows the state of affairs and the trajectory into the future on a continuous basis.
If a need is assumed for laws, regulations and enforcement, it is not Utopia. Oversight and engagement of the workforce, the pulling of rank, is the hallmark of dystopia. Without trust, husbandry of Utopia viability is impossible. External agencies for which one must comply are positive signposts of dystopia.
Utopia is a social system where the things important to viability and continuance are competently done by people who are happy to do them.
I suggest you balance your philosophical framework with a little Utopia-think. I promise you it will upset your audience more than your parade of takes on dystopia-man. And, it is a hell of a lot more revealing – and fun.
Republican presumptive nominee for President of the United States, Donald James Trump, acting like a Utopian, has shown in plain view the entire Establishment to be dysfunctional – both parties. Notice he doesn’t play zero-sum? If he wins, Democrat will merge with Republican as the anti-utopia party.
Cheers
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
It would appear that my response to your most recent note gave the impression I have little sense of the difference between utopia and dystopia. It is apparent that the description (not the actual part, which there are twelve to date) is what readers think is the essence of Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land. It is not. The description is a tease.
Thank you for your explanation of your sense of utopia relative to dystopia. Clearly, we are addressing each other from our biases and experiences, and they do not compute. I fail to see utopia in terms of natural law, science and mathematics as the engine to an idealistic paradigm. For me, utopia is the problem, not the answer.
My work is a description of a situation not a resolution of a condition. I think man, when he gets past his utopianism, mathematically or otherwise, he will find a way, or frankly perish.
The essence of NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND is just that. We are living as if this is utopia – building, progressing, exploring, creating, seeking, and using our new religion, science, to justify this mad dash to oblivion, which is Nowhere Land. This is, of course, also dystopia, but on the wings of misguided utopia.
Optimism and hubris are but stepchildren of utopia. That is what this book is about.
It is poets and philosophers, and sometimes social scientists that throw down the gauntlet when we are heading to extinction, not engineer, not scientists, and surely not the likes of Douglas McGregor and Christopher Argyris.
Their problem, and the problem of most knowledge peddlers of the 20th century is that people were the problem, and that if those that led people were more sensitive to people as human being, all would be well. Moreover, it became a given that corporate society, the society that had evolved out of war, was not only legitimate, but inevitable.
The focus was always on people as something to fix, not on the fixers being people.
What has happened during the One Hundred Year War of the 20th century is that people have emerged somewhat tentatively but nonetheless actually out of the crowd, into alienation, and then somewhat hopelessly, back into the crowd.
In 1947, after WWII, English poet W. H. Auden (1907 – 1973) published “The Age of Anxiety.” Change was in the air. American author Anatole Broyard (1920 - 1990) writes:
“It seems to me now that Americans were confronting their loneliness for the first time. Loneliness was like the morning after the war, like a great hangover. The war had broken the rhythm of American life, and when we tried to pick it up again, we couldn’t find it – it wasn’t there. It was as if a great bomb, an explosion of consciousness, had gone off in American life, shattering everything.”
What produced the hangover has led to addiction, hubris, arrogance, narcissism, self-righteousness and painting the dark mushroom cloud of our consciousness into utopian irrationality and excess.
This has given birth to existentialism, Freudianism, psychotherapy, plastic surgery, and the narcissistic burning of the candle at both ends still believing the possibility of living to 100 with a miraculous concoction of drugs.
Suddenly, we took French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) to heart: “One’s self is not an extension of the world but merely, and quite inevitably, another object contained with it.”
Dislocated from reality, just when we thought we were protected individuals by the rights of our American constitution, the 20th century annihilated our individualism.
Following this was the absence of personality finding us all in an emotional anemic daze, waiting for someone to rescue us. Alas, there is always an army with that in mind, only these gurus and sycophants inevitably drive us more deeply into despair.
The irony, and Dostoyevsky wrote many books on this subject, is that we live today in a paraxial relationship to utopia and dystopia. The Russian author says, “We are incapable of either dying or being born again,” but simply existing waiting to be saved.
We are inauthentic to ourselves so how can we be authentic to anyone else? There is little civility or respect when there is no self-respect.
NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE MAN addresses this status but the effort is not meant to correct, to create some new laws, or to put people back on the “right” path. It is simply to show “what is.” The rest is up to the individual.
Perhaps that is how we differ. You have corrective strategies. I do not. You look at the situation in terms of utopia in a resolving paradigm. I see utopia the principal preoccupation leading to the wilderness I describe.
Is this nihilistic? I don’t think so. I think it is reality. Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855) claimed “Truth is subjectivity.” I argue that feelings are facts to most people, and that they behave consistent with those feelings.
In 1945, President Harry S. Truman (1884 – 1972) dropped an atomic bomb on our collective conscious across the globe, not just in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, shattering our individual identity and fragmenting our collective conscious resulting in our descent into an obsessions with the irrational.
Like it or not, we act like Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land. We are not happy campers; we have lost our moral compass and our way.
American sociologist David Riesman (1909 – 2002) was ahead of the curve when he published The Lonely Crowd (1950), providing a description of the American psyche, post-WWII. He could see modern man was becoming increasingly inauthentic to himself as an individual with him seeking credibility in a collective conscience provided by a media-driven corporate society.
Three distinct types of men were evolving: (1) the tradition-directed man; (2) the inner-directed man; and (3) the other-directed man.
Today, we see the devolving of the tradition-directed and inner-directed man to the evolving dominance of the other-directed man as the consciousness of our times. This is the mind of the crowd, the mind without a conscience, the mind that always looks for answers outside the self.
So, nearly seven decades later, we see what happens when safe, secure and carefully planned communities devolve into gang war zones in the shadow of magnificent metropolitan glass houses and sprawling suburbs of postage-sized plots of brick and mortar as dwelling spaces.
As British “New Age” philosopher Alan W. Watts might say, “Nothing is more hopeless than planned happiness.”
No one seems more bored and alienated today than highly successful people. They fill the reality television shows, newsstands with magazines, pulp fiction bestsellers, and drug rehabilitation centers with stories of their mind-numbing dissatisfaction with work, life, marriage, and prospects for the future. Social pathology has become the norm.
Finally, your comment is insightful but troubling: re: Donald Trump, acting like a Utopian, has shown in plain view the entire Establishment to be dysfunctional – both parties. Notice he doesn’t play zero-sum? If he wins, Democrats will merge with Republican as the anti-utopia party.
Missing here is the significance of the Democratic candidate for President, Senator Bernie Sanders, who is quite utopian in his vision, not so much in his running for president, but more in his reminding us, like Chicken Little that “The Sky is Falling!”
The "sky is falling!" You cannot leave 90 percent of the people out of the conversation and expect everything to be copacetic.
Donald Trump is utopian in a dystopian way because were he to be elected President of the United States, he would not only throw both parties into anti-utopianism, but possibly the globe into revolution. He epitomizes Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land, and this is being said by a lifelong Republican.
