Popular Posts

Friday, June 24, 2016

The Peripatetic Philosopher presents:

NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND



Amazon Kindle Library -- $0.99


BOOK DESCRIPTION


We have lost our sense of identity as we think we are different than others, when that is an impossibility.  Life has become like looking into a mirror, seeing our reflection, thinking that is who we are and what life is about.  It is not.  Life is an open window with a world like ours only different.  Instead of embracing this difference, we are repelled and seek others with the same mirror image.

We fail to realize everything we have is not ours but everyone’s.  We are only renters of a cultural construct that goes back to the time of Cro-Magnon man.

We believe what we see is reality but it is not.  It is a function of the alphabet that was invented thousands of years ago: from letters, to words, to sentences, to thoughts, to ideas, to seeing the world sequentially.  The mind has adapted to this sequential reality which is limited.  

Our religions are also rented after thousands of years of tinkering, and more alike than different.  Christianity is a Hellenistic product from what St. Paul rented from Protagoras, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle with the earth the center of the universe.  This was then refuted by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton so that the universe no longer fits with an easy reference to God or any theology.   

Alas, the human mind has been given a second chance with the supernatural placed in the closet while theories and disciplines surge from quantum mechanics to chaos theory, from the Big Bang and Dark Matter, to string theory with a new perspective on time, space, matter and energy. No longer do we see the universe as a tidy place, or nailed down to preconceived notions. 

Yet, Nowhere Man hides in the shadows as science is now tempted to play the role of high church when it comes to global warming and creationism. It seems apparent we never move too far from our penchant for absolutes.

NEXT

NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- PART FOURTEEN -- THE AGE OF FAITH

Saturday, June 18, 2016

THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER shares an exchange:



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.

Friday, June 17, 2016

THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER candidly responds:

A Reader Describes
NOWHERE LAND IN NOWHERE LAND

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 17, 2016



A READER WRITES:

Your current work is really describing the social “system” called “dystopia.” Its attributes and characteristics come as a set (he provides the set).


DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

It is interesting how this series -- NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- is being perceived by readers.

Over the past several years, I have been reading rather extensively from the inconceivable rise of Rome from but a fledgling little city-state to the world's most dominant empire, through the improbable rise of Christianity to the most dominant religion, indeed, culture in the Western world, to how it has seeded modern civilization if unconsciously through the Protestant Reformation and American/French Revolutions into the corporate society that dominates the planet now, a domination that is the antithesis of the Laws of Nature.

The subtext of this advance, over time, going back even earlier to the rise of the chieftain and the shaman in prehistoric times, is that conscious man is mainly unconscious as he puts one foot in front of another going forward into the next space and place, unaware and uncomprehending the consequences of his actions.

Some twenty years or so ago in reading Christian scholars -- and always Dostoyevsky -- I sensed, but not very clearly, the duality of our nature as man, and that includes utopia/dystopia.

Although hardly qualified to exploit this ambivalence, I have made the attempt for my own satisfaction. Call it my entertainment.

The theme kept reappearing as I read, distilling my particular sense of things, then capturing these thoughts in an occasional "Fragments of a Philosophy." My works are peppered with these fragments.

Over several months, I knocked off a complete manuscript (never published) "Near Journey's End? Can Planet Earth Survive Self-Indulgent Man?"

One day I picked this manuscript up again and reread it -- I have that tendency -- and saw how harsh I can be. Call it anger or disgust, or whatever, it gets the juices flowing.

Truthfully, I've never been too concerned about readers. I don't expect them to agree, but if they are thinking at all beyond existing I suspect they might find something of value in my writings that connects. I am not into the proselytizing business.

It is an amazing what freedom a writer enjoys when he can write to his heart’s content without a deadline, an agent, or a publisher.

After reading a series of dystopian novels, and rereading T. S. Eliot's "Wasteland," I got a sense that man has always been "nowhere," lost in space and place, and that he operates mainly but cleverly on automatic pilot.

Man is constantly inventing and reinventing "mind toys" that give him a sense that he is in charge, when he is not, which drives him ever deeper into "nowhere land," as I see evident every day.

Take Shanghai, China. It just opened the most gigantic Disney World ever with buildings skyscraper high too boost tourism. It is a $5.5 million investment. Meanwhile, millions of Chinese are starving or without adequate housing or jobs.

What China is doing the West has been doing for centuries. It is called capitalism.

We are an imitative society, a compare and compete society, a corporate society, and now a global society that doesn't seem to realize that our unconscious tendencies represent our collective deathknell as we destroy our guest place on this planet, but we cannot help ourselves. We are not in charge, but we have never been in charge. We go from one crisis to another, mainly self-invented, but nonetheless devastating.

Am I mad? Perhaps. Unhinged? That could be true, too, but one attribute that I have always believed I possess and that is conceptual skills. I can pile one idea/event/happening/situation on top of another over time, and they provide me with something resembling a picture. That is the case with the current project, being provided to readers in tiny segments for mastication.

That said several times I have thought of stopping this nonsense, this NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND but something just keeps pulling me forward.

All our inventions -- morality, ethics, humanity, science and philosophy -- fail to understand that we don't belong here, that we are guests of a planet that has no conscience, that doesn't believe in good and evil, right and wrong, happiness and sadness, it just "is," and its "isness" is that finds us increasingly corrupting its hospitality for our insane purposes.
*  *  *  *  *

Thursday, June 16, 2016

THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER shares:



AMAZON.COM KINDLE LIBRARY
$0.99

DESCRIPTION:

A sense of having a mandate is a dangerous thing for a government, or indeed for any corporate body.  It is equally true in a presidential campaign, as we see unfolding in 2016 by the Democratic and Republican Parties for President of the United States. 

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the presumptive nominees, but political life, like life in general, at its deepest level cannot be viewed simply in the short-term.  It must be viewed also in the long term with a visceral connection to the “collective will” of the people.  Will that happen?  We shall see. 

Alas, there is little evidence of a seamless connection of this “collective will” with either candidate within their respective parties much less with voters as both political parties have been ruptured by discord.  This climate of dissension appears endemic to this most divisive age.  This happens when trust between the people and its leadership disappears.   

It is a dangerous time when too much space separates the “collective will” of the led from the leadership.  Should that breach be ignored, should public opinion be manipulated to the point that the “collective will” of the people is problematic, then we find ourselves in Nowhere Land. 

The problem with a mandate is that it is never about the leadership, always about the “collective will” of the people. This is not limited to the people as a collective in the nation, but to the private citizen in the community as well.



The political mind of the times too often displays a utopian complacency thinking that “collective will” mirrors its own self-interests. This prevents such a mind from seeing the world clearly, the problems of the world truthfully, and its own motivation honestly. Whatever the case may be, this has led to another important crossroads in American as well as world history. 


NEXT

NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND – PART THIRTEEN – OUR COMMON HERITAGE – CULTURAL DIVERSITY!


Monday, June 06, 2016

THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER presents:


KINDLE LIBRARY -- $0.99


DESCRIPTION

Christianity and “The Jesus Story” is an improbable narrative with Jesus, the messianic Jew, being lost in a Christianity that would become a Gentile faith. 

Historic Jesus was born to the peasant class in the small hamlet of Nazareth in Judea.  He spoke Aramaic, the language of the working class, grew up without formal schooling among fisherman and farmers.  Chances are he could neither read nor write, but was well versed in the oral history of Jewish Law and the Old Testament. 

“The Jerusalem Group” he headed was a Jewish Reform Movement meant to restore moral and spiritual integrity to the Jewish Temple.  This led to conflict with the High Priests and Elders, leading to his “Crucifixion on the Cross,” a death limited to egregious criminals, being buried in a rich man’s sepulcher with reality and myth then taking over as he left no written record.

The next improbability was the role of Paul turning Jesus’s ministry from the Jews to the Gentiles, while the Gospel writers, penning accounts of his life and ministry 40 to 100 years after his death, romanticized that period so that these Gospels cannot be trusted as representative of Jesus or his life.

The “Siege of Jerusalem” in 70 C.E. destroyed the Second Temple, decimated the Jewish faith, destroyed Jewish Christianity, but launched Christianity as a “Gentile Faith” to flourish in the Mediterranean while being persecuted by Rome.


Equally improbable, this all changed with Christianity becoming the “State Religion of the Roman Empire” in 380 C.E., leading to the Roman Catholic Church and a Christianity of more than 1 billion Catholic souls today.  


NEXT

NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND -- PART TWELVE -- A SENSE OF MANDATE!