The Peripatetic Philosopher introduces:

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Time Out for Sanity!

Blueprint for Dealing with an Anxious Age!

CERTAINTY AND TRUTH DISPELLED

Little did I know when I first wrote “A Look Backward to See Ahead” (2007) that the United States of Anxiety would become a societal pandemic beyond comprehension.  Since anxiety is worrying about what never happens, I thought in due course Americans would have to grow up and face the reality of a changing world in which they were not the center of interest.  But alas, that did not happen.

So when TATE Publishing Company asked me to edit, revise and expand my treatise, along with nine other of my books, in 2012, I went back to the original manuscript that I had written mainly for my own edification with no plans of publishing.  As is my inclination, I can be quite brusque and to the point with no cushioning for the reader’s comfort.  That manuscript was composed in 1980.

At the time, I could see Americans were concerned about certainty and truth.  The only problem is that there is no such thing as certainty and truth is relative, as your truth may not be my truth, and German truth may not be French truth, and so on.  The whole “Age of the Enlightenment” with such notables as Kant, Descartes, Spinoza and the like, along with the “new science” seemed confident that they had found the key to this dichotomy of certainty and truth.    

For those that are faithful readers to my missives and books, they are aware that I have a problem with this predilection.  Meanwhile, I have watched as American society became comfortable in complacency reacting to events rather than anticipating them; how it treated rhetoric as reality, rearing its children without a moral compass and therefore ill prepared to suffer the consequences of their actions; treating its workers as management dependent or counter dependent on the company for their total well-being, displaying learned helplessness while fixated in arrested development failing to reach the maturity of adults.

This has been the focus of a series of books: Work Without Management: A View from the Trenches; The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain; Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership and Dissonant Workers; Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge, among others. 

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP – WHAT DOES IT TELL US?

When I was an athlete in my youth, we lost some games we were expected to win and suffered the humiliation of defeat.  Only a teenage boy, I understood the rules, never saw the game as being rigged, and with tears in my eyes, shook the hands of my opponents, while sulking for a spell wondering what I could have done better. 

I didn’t blame the referees if it were a basketball game, or the umpire if it were a football game, or indeed, if it were a teacher that gave me a bad grade on a test that I thought I had clearly done better.  If I failed, for some reason, call it my training, I looked to myself for the failure, never thinking that it was the referee’s fault, the umpire’s calling balls and strikes, the teacher’s subjective grading system, or even the coach’s fault for not preparing me better for the contest.  I was not alone as my teammates were of the same mind and inclination as I was.  What happened to this?

Well, of course, I don’t for sure.  I only know what I experienced and observed in the microcosm.  Many parents of my generation, children of the Great Depression of 1929, and born in the 1930s, especially those who came from the working class poor, but somehow benefitted from the post-World War Two economic bonanza where good paying jobs were plentiful, decided they didn’t want their children to go through that same trauma, which is understandable.  Many couldn’t do enough for their children as they didn’t want them to feel the trauma, the uncertainty, while selling them on the truth that they were special because they were Americans.

As a consequence, they never had to grow up.  These were the baby boomers, children born in the 1950s and 1960s. 

I know this first hand as I constantly reminded my children that their grandfather, whom they had never met, was a brakeman on the railroad, and although their father had an executive position, and they traveled the world with him, he had had no safety net, no inheritance, and that he had no choice but to suffer the consequences of his actions, and that this was the most powerful legacy of his life. 

Obviously, they didn’t want to hear this.  Then to their consternation, their father “retired” in his thirties, and charted out a much more modest existence, one in which they had to adapt, and one in which they were not too happy to endure.  But they found their way, on their own, with little help from their father.  That is his legacy to them, which he hopes they will instill in their children, but which the jury is still out on that ledger. 

So, what does this have to do with President-elect Donald Trump?  Everything!

The United States of Anxiety has become a spoiled brat society, and the more readers protest the fact the more they reify its existence.  If this were not enough, the media stoke this angst and fuel this fire with syndicated columnists previously known for their balance, but who have gone off the rails since certainty and truth have proven to be false indicators.   

David Brooks writes, “After all, the guy (President-elect Trump) will probably resign or be impeached within a year.  The future is closer than you think.”

Leonard Pitts writes, “A black woman I know (Pitts is an African American journalist) got a text from a friend who asked what she’d be wearing to the slave auction in January . . . Maybe we are too alarmist. Or maybe we’re not alarmist enough.”

In the author’s note to “Time Out for Sanity”:

While science is looking for a universal theory, social and economic thinkers seem to be looking for an ecumenical system that answers all the questions . . .  The result is that there is seemingly a constant clash between progressive and reactionary agendas.  The obstructionists ignore the complexity of the problems being faced while progressive deny the existence of these problems and turn their attention to irrelevancies. 

The American Democratic Party got caught up in this maze with its certainty and truth rejected and now the dignity of the Presidency of the United States calls for a “Time Out for Sanity!”