The Peripatetic Philosopher shares yet another:

TEN CREATIVE STAGES TO CONFIDENT THINKING

Excerpt

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 29, 2017

FALLACY OF COMPANY "AS FAMILY"

Companies encouraged the prevailing attitude of dependency by creating the impression that the company "is a family." No company or workplace "is a family." No organization in any type of enterprise "is a family." The idea that an overreaching authority is “family” to the man inside the group is an illusion. Yet, the symbolism of "family" is powerful. It was formed in childhood and has been altered little to become something of a truism. Unfortunately, the truism has no legs.

You don't throw the family out on the street; don't make fam­ily members redundant; don't move everything to another state or country and claim you had no choice. With family, there is no such thing as an "outside authority." Family is blood and des­tiny with no special lifeboats for select members when the ship is going down. Family controls its destiny if it has the courage to do so. Companies often lack such gumption.

We are born alone; we live largely alone; and we die alone. We all have peers, but the child is parent to the man. Each man is sovereign in his own life and way. The illusion of "fam­ily" or outside authority that wraps its magnanimous arms around us and looks after us is a utopian dream. It is the fear of freedom that finds us craving a safety net to escape responsibility for ourselves. English poet John Donne’s (1571 - 1631) "Triple Fool" touches on this woe:

"I am two fools, I know for loving, and for saying so in whining poetry:

But where's that Wiseman, that would not be I, if she would not deny!

Then as the earth's inward narrow crooked lanes do purge sea water's fretful salt away, I thought, if I could draw my pains through rhyme's vexation, I should them allay,

Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce.

But when I have done so, some man, his art and voice to show,

Doth set and sing my pain, and, by delighting many, frees again, grief, which verse did restrain.

To love and grief tribute of verse belongs, but not of such as pleases when `tis read,

Both are increased by such songs: for both their tri­umphs so are published,

And I, which was two fools, do so grow three; who are a little wise, the best fools be."

I've often read this poem when I've been down on myself and   somewhat discouraged for whatever reason. The poem reminds me that we stumble forward as individuals, and that it is a false promise to believe the "family" sentiment of corporate society as parent rescues us from that reality. 

The workplace or the Congress of the United States or the church cannot protect us from ourselves, but it can make us weak and vulnerable children. Our employers can intimate they have our backs and can protect us from the ravages of life; from the ravages that make us strong, straight, wise and courageous.  All we have to do is give up our freedom.  

But we were not made to be protected from life or ourselves.  Nor were we meant to be protected from failure which is the only route to success.  We were meant to be free which allows us to fail and fall and to pick ourselves up again and again. Why deny us that possibility; why trap us in the permanent state of children forever dependent as employees on the CEO or his equivalent as parent with him with a "god complex"?

It is because of this social syndrome why parents still control their fifty-year-old children, and why CEOs make 500 to 1,000 times as much as the aver­age worker. We are willing to pay that heavy price to an "outside authority" to maintain the approval of a parent or stay in the perpetual good graces of the boss. When we do this, and most of us do in corporate society, we abdicate our "inner authority" and our freedom but not without consequences.

We hear and believe the CEO when he says, "It is only a rumor that there will be massive layoffs. We are optimistic about our future." Countless examples of these dissembling lines sur­faced in the 2007-2008 with the global economy meltdown. A generation ago, Enron's founder and CEO said those precise words repeat­edly before he and the Enron CEO team vanished into scandal­ous infamy in 2001.

President Barak Obama lied dozens of times from 2008 through 2013, when Obamacare was being implemented stating, "With the Affordable Care Act, you can keep your health care plan if you want, period!" Dissembling has become second nature to those in leadership positions, while paradoxi­cally advocating transparency.

Notice the pageantry, the pomp and circumstance when the CEO of a company visits one of his far-flung satellite operations. You can see the trusting eyes of the workers as the CEO utters his reassurances. He is their father figure, affable, approachable, and always godlike. Workers place him on a pedestal so his head is always higher than theirs; his reach always farther, his horizons always wider, and his words balm for their worried souls. They believe because they want to believe, like children.

The CEO entertains selected questions collected beforehand. The questions have the implicit character of infantile demands: "Is this plant going to stay open?  Will we have the option to continue working if we don't want the buyout?"

Workers want the reassurance once provided by their parents. The CEO, coached by his public relations people, answers as if on a political stump:

"I looked in our three acre parking lot this morning and I saw it full of vehicles, not an empty space. Does that answer your question?"

Of course it doesn't, but who is going to challenge “god”?  The comment is appropriately followed by supportive laugher, clap­ping, and even a few hoorahs.

The child-in-the-worker says, "He means we're in business for the long haul." Wishful thinking fueled by the CEO's comment can become a fatal disease.  Then, to the second question about a "buyout," the CEO grows merry; his countenance takes on the demea­nor of a cherubic archangel. "I've been looking at those buyout packages, and think I'd be tempted to take one myself and go fishing."

Laughter again rises from the floor to another non-answer to the question. It lifts the CEO off his throne and carries him through a sea of complacent idolaters. No one dare break the spell.

Companies have paid dearly for this, as we now know. The only guarantee a worker should truly expect is a full day's pay for a full day's work. There are no guarantees in life, and why should work be any different? It puts the worker on his mettle when he knows he always has to perform. When I was a college student, and something of a grind, I was often asked, "Why do you study so hard? You've already clinched an “A”? You could flunk the final and still ace the course."

First of all, it was my nickel that put me in school, all my own nickels. Secondly, I was determined to learn as much as I possibly could. And thirdly, and this was important, I believed in my own heart that I could flunk out at any time. Nothing was ever taken for granted because I knew I could never charm a professor to get a good grade. I was stuck with me, and that me was not always too easy to take.

It will take some time, and I'm sure, reprogramming, if work­ers are to assume responsibility for their own security and future. It is clear they must find a way to add value status to their job. This will promote individual security, and by extension, company stability. Somehow this got lost in post-World War II euphoria, and now everyone is suffering for this failure.

It has been my observation that for every hard working per­son, there are four that are dogging it.

What is sad about this is that everyone knows who these peo­ple are, but no one does anything about them. Mired in learned help­lessness, hard workers don't want to be labeled snitches, while loafers know how to play the system to their advantage. Since loafers are paid the same, they busy themselves looking for ways to redirect attention by constant complaining or flattering their bosses. Like the disruptive child that used tears to get its way, these workers know the squeaky wheel gets the oil. So, while hard workers are focusing on work, these other workers are nitpicking or focusing on making an impression. Loafers have killed the golden goose, and now, with matters as they are, with a global economy in full swing, the blame game has no fire or audience.

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares:

TEN CREATIVE STAGES TO CONFIDENT THINKING

Another Excerpt

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

© June 26, 2017

Note:

This book will soon be available in paperback and e-book on www.amazon.com.

THE STUMBLING DESCENT INTO CHAOS

Someone once said that there is only one religion but it has a thousand faces. If you look beyond the dogma or doctrine of Hinduism, Confucianism, Shintoism, Buddhism, Islamism, Judaism, and Christianity, to name only a few, you see how true this is. Respect for another is basic to all religions. They have kept the world reasonably stable and civil, but there is evidence that this spiritual rectitude is waning magnified by population growth and exploding technology disrupting social and political norms across the globe since World War II.

Drunk with power and Toys of the Mind supplied by technology, we have not yet awakened from our hangover to perceive the dam­age done to others and ourselves for the "cut and control" massive accelerating change in the name of "progress."

Along with this self-indulgent dance, we have stumbled into the fear and paranoia brought on by WMDs in the hands of rogue nations. The complexity and finality of these weapons is too much for us to get our heads around. This gives the psycho­logical edge to any minor group of scoundrels capable of exploiting this sickness.

During the administration of President George W. Bush (2000-2008), we had the “good twins” of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who had a remarkable resemblance in so many frightening ways to the “evil twins” of Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Goring of Nazi Germany in WWII.  Both sets of twins were grand manipulators of psychological warfare that spun out of control in the actual war.

As US Vice President and Secretary of  Defense, respectively, they used propaganda and patriotism as trump cards to play on our national psyche. It took the 2006 Democratic sweep of the US Congress at mid-term elections to dislodge this dynamic duo from the scene. The damage, however, was already done with the preemptive invasion of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.

We are in a pesky schizophrenic economy that lingers on after the 2007-2008 subprime meltdown, the malfeasance of Wall Street, the collapse of General Motors and Chrysler, all of which required government bailouts to survive. Contrast this with General Motors' recent history.  The nation’s largest automaker earned more than $40 billion in profit since it emerged from its bankruptcy in 2009 and the subsequent bailout, of course, at the expense of US taxpayers.

President Barak Obama, the first United States African American president (2008-2016), demonstrated approach avoidance behavior throughout his two terms as president not seeming to decide what to do with or about Russia, Syria and Iran until it was too late, giving the United States the reputation of “leading from behind” only to be followed by a complete political novice at the helm in President Donald J. Trump.    

Businessman Trump became a billionaire by mastering the strategy of a game of "smoke and mirrors."  Now, in the early days of his administration (2017), it seems clear he still suffers from an excess of hubris with his constant tweeting and texting as if still a teenager against real and imaginary adversaries, failing to understand that whatever the President of the United States says reverberates across the globe. 

Syndicated columnist and psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer claims President Trump suffers from an “excess of id,” while columnist Peggy Noonan suggests he has no idea of the norms, rules and traditions of the job as president, and as a consequence, puts the United States and the world in jeopardy.  Little wonder why the world remains especially nervous.

Nazism rose out of Germany's humiliating surrender at Versailles after WWI damaging the mythical pride of the German people with Adolf Hitler rising to power on the theme of Germany as the Aryan Master Race. This led to WWII.  If he was a monster, as many scholars claim, and the very personification of evil, what say we of good men who stumble into equal calamity and chaos and behave monstrously?

After the Twin Towers in New York City were destroyed on September 11, 2001, leading to the death of nearly 3,000 innocent people by Islam terrorists flying American commercial jetliners into these buildings, President George W. Bush authorized a 2003 preemptive invasion of Iraq with the faulty claim Iraq had WMD or Weapons of Mass Destruction.  His legacy is the continuation of that quagmire with the Iraq War now the longest war in American history.

Once elected, President Barak Obama fulfilled a campaign promise by signing an executive order for a massive troop withdrawal from Iraq in 2010 with that country descending into civil war that continues. Bush also commenced a war in Afghanistan with fluctuating results with Obama again withdrawing troops from that country in 2014 only to have to resend thousands of troops back as Afghanistan was on the verge of civil war. 

Obama is an intellectual and a perfect foil to those who think one race is superior to another, while unfortunately giving credence to the belief, repeated by philosopher Eric Hoffer among others: “Give intellectuals anything but political power.” 

Few question the sobriquet that the United States is "the lone superpower" with American troops on 800 outposts across the globe. Yet the US didn't look too super after the Katrina disaster; the stalemate in Afghanistan; the hasty withdrawal from Iraq; the handling of economic collapse of 2007-2008; or now, the clear ambivalence of US policy with the civil war in Syria.

For whatever reason, or justification, leadership at every institutional level in the United States is not having a good season.

Nor does the US look quite like a super power when a quarter of American students fail to finish high school; when the middle class is shrinking; when the US infrastructure is in sad shape; when obesity across American society is on the rise as “fast food nation”; when corporate and government corruption seemingly never seems to abate nearly a decade after the subprime meltdown; when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are still hurting as are Citigroup, AIG and the Big Three automakers despite GM's surreal blip.  Meanwhile, failsafe guidelines are proposed which corporate America ignores under no penalty.

The United States, ever the optimistic nation, while it continues to stumble into mounting chaos, points to the Dow Jones Industrials which have soared above 21,000, while tiny North Korea is saber rattling threatening to launch nuclear missiles against South Korea, Japan and the United States’ Island of Guam. Alas, you can never take your first and last freedom for granted.

Psychologist James Hillman in "A Terrible Love of War" (2004) sees war or rumors of war normalized as an everyday affair. War gives soldiers and victims a profound sense of prestige. War fosters an impossible collection of opposites: killing and soldierly comradeship; torture and religious zeal; genocide and patriotism; foe obliteration and immortal glory. People dead to life find war exhilarating, lifting them out of their stupor and despair. Death is preferred to life. With life, you cannot hide from fear. Even ants behave better than humans as E. 0. Wilson shows in "Naturalist" (1994):

"When an ant dies, and if it has not been crushed or torn apart, it simply crumples up and lies still. Although its posture and inactivity are abnormal, nest mates continue to walk by it as though nothing has happened. Two or three day's pass before recognition dawns, and then it is through the smell of decomposition.  Responding to the order, a nest mate picks the corpse up, carries it out of the nest, and dumps it on a nearby refuse pile."

Possibly, Hilton's terrible love of war is why renegade Islamic groups behave as they do. Suicide bombers take on the guise of heroes in a time without heroes convinced a better life awaits them in Paradise. Insanity as sanity is the prime mover in the "love of war."

This is as true of advanced societies as of primitive, as true of the East as the West, the North as the South. Suicide bombers are a sad reality, but crimes against humanity take many forms. 

Take the incarceration without rights of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Fear is the only justification, fear of what they might do if given their freedom. This fear is palpable and people everywhere under­stand it as they have the same trepidations. Fear was the popular confection that guided the “good twins” as it did the “evil twins,” and fear is always the province of the unknown or the unknowable.

Fear has shown its face in Iraq and Afghanistan where young men and women with guns have been known to commit atrocities common to war, behavior uncommon to their nature. Nearly a quarter of returning American veterans suffer Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), many attempt suicide. You place any­one in harm's way where fear is his only companion and terrible things are bound to happen.

Fear is the driving force in the economics of plenty. It has taken the life out of death, and put death into life as these young men and women know only too well. By the United States imposing our system of democracy on Afghanistan and Iraq, we have lost our own confidence and identity as a people. The irony is that we have attempted to stabilize their governance with our system when we cannot seem to stabilize our own.

Afghanistan and Iraq, among other Middle Eastern countries, reflect the gamesmanship played on their turf by the West since WWI. It is madness for one culture to impose its idiosyncratic ways on another ostensibly to demonstrate its sense of superiority, as it inevitably results in push back.

Afghanistan and Iraq reflect the way colonial Americans reacted to the colonial dominance of Great Britain. We fail to see these countries in that same context. We had the great American Civil War between the North and the South that nearly destroyed the United States as a nation. Would we have wanted interference in that war?

We have a problem seeing our villainous ways, or our justification for such villainy choosing instead to see our intentions always noble, never pragmatic; our motivation above reproach and altruistic, never self-interested.  It is as if we believe we have answers to everyone’s dilemma when we seem unable to solve our own.

WHEN INSANITY RULES

We, as a nation, are not prepared to accept ourselves as we are, much less to be tolerant students of others as we find them. What opportunity for tolerance is there when some people are seen as "jungle bunnies" and others as "lords of welfare"? 

By the accident of our birth and circumstance, ethnicity and gender are who we are. We are blessed to live in a free society, so how can we explain being a nation that is overweight, undereducated, unsophisticated, grasping for straws while waving the American flag as if that changes everything?  These are some things that come to mind to recognize this faultline and to mount an effort to live in peace with others:

We must learn to understand each other not from our perspective but from theirs.

 It means looking at others through their eyes and not ours.

It means having some understanding of their history and culture and what is especially meaningful to them in that context.

It means having some familiarity with their struggles and triumphs, tragedies and challenges, and how these came to define them.

It means being acquainted with their leadership, both fanatical and moderate in governance and religion, and how this has influenced them as a people.

It means seeing them in the light of today and what they are struggling for, and why.

It means knowing others as much as possible as they know themselves.

What you are likely to find is that most people prefer to live in their own culture and be left alone; to enjoy the comfort of family; to work in their chosen ways; and to live in peace with the trappings of their provincial life and culture without outside interference.

We are not, by nature, a people in general, but persons in particular. Much as we are alike, tolerance and acceptance does not preclude us preferring our own.  To state this more poignantly: 

When collateral damage of civilian populations is considered a necessary cost of warfare, insanity rules.

In Vietnam, when a commander says, "I had to destroy the village to save it," insanity rules.

Insanity and inanity has a common human face. When al Qaeda destroyed the Twin Towers to make a statement, taking 3,000 lives, insanity rules.

When the US invades Afghanistan, a country run by warlords that previously humiliated the Soviet Union, insanity rules.

When the US invades Iraq, a sovereign nation run by a dictator under the contrived justification of Iraq having WMDs, insanity rules.

When the US withholds humanitarian aid from a democratically elected Hamas government in Palestine, because it has been designated a terrorist organization, insanity rules.

When the US conducts a "war on terror" and spends hundreds of billions of dollars on a war with no defined enemy and no ultimate endgame, insanity rules.

When the heart, soul and will of a country remains flabby in self-indulgence, insanity rules.

The Confident Thinker has to step back and sift through all the information that bombards the senses to see what makes sense and what does not. This calls for deprogramming old conditioning and developing creative understanding where insanity no longer rules.

We should not look to the media nor to the government, the church, our family, or our neighbors to do this for us. The answers are not in Time or Newsweek, not in Foreign Affairs, The London Times, The New York Review, The London Review, The National Review, The New York Times or The Washington Post. 

Answers to what trouble us are not in network or cable television news; not in PBS News Hour with Mark Shields and David Brooks; nor are they to be found in a plethora of tabloid publications with insider gossip that glut the counters of supermarket checkouts. 

Nor are answers to be found listening to celebrated pundits, the lights of think tanks or Ivy League dons.  They are found in talking to a Pakistani service station neighbor or Thai barber, Vietnamese grocer, Chinese waitress, Turkish engineer, Indian bookseller, Iranian dry cleaner, or hundreds of others who connect us to a common world and  a common destiny.

This is not easy for a nation that adores celebrity, worships youth, plans never to grow up or grow old, that spends more for plastic surgery than the Gross Domestic Product of many African nations, and plies its innovative nature to all manner of escapism. When there is no place for reality, "nowhere land" becomes home to a homeless mind.

Talking can be a tricky business for while we speak the same American language we seldom say what we mean, or mean what we say. We must get past the words to know how other people feel. The heart reads people better than the head. Someone who talks like you, dresses like you, spouts a litany of similar biases, can sway your head, but not your heart if it has your attention. The heart recognizes the counterfeit.

To learn where another person is coming from, you need to listen, not lecture. The less you fill the void with your noise the more apt you are to learn. This means fighting the inclination to be judgmental. The critical parent oozes from our subconscious not necessarily from our lips. If you think critically of another, chances are that person will feel it. Remember, when you help others you help yourself, but it is never all about you.

On a wider scale, it is difficult to be empathetic about the plight of another when you are worried about losing your $800,000 home. Your kitchen is likely to cost more than a tent city of one hundred refugees in Darfur. You cannot change this picture, but you can put aside your xenophobic biases about immigrants, legal and otherwise, who are your convenience store workers, gas station operators, gardeners, taxi drivers, short order cooks, dishwashers, fruit pickers, house cleaners, beautician shop sweepers, computer installers, and neighbors. Xenophobia doesn't do anyone any good.

The Peripatetic Philosopher reflects:

A READER COMMENTS ON EXCERPT

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

© June 20, 2017

A READER WRITES:

Jim.

By golly-wolly!

I recently was alerted (again?) to "In Praise of Folly" (re: excerpt from “The Ten Creative States to Confident Thinking”) and observe how this clown (President Donald J. Trump) and his entourage manifests himself in today's dominant circles.

Less so in the clergy, perhaps, but strongly in the political upper class. Five and a half centuries have gone by. History repeats itself because of the constancy of human nature. But the repeating is not circular, but spiral because of the uplifting effect of developing insights. Repetition and progress operating together to create that spiral. In effect, this appears to me a duplicating of the spiral of the evolution of the species: the same basic raw materials generating ever complex organisms.

Irrelevant to this discussion, but something that strikes me is the parallel between Erasmus's goddess Folly and Boethius' goddess Philosophy. Isn't it amazing how so many ancients, without TV and other modern tools managed to gather so much deep knowledge and synthesize it for good use?

Best,

Henry

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

My dear professor friend,

I hope summer has come to Canada and that the breeze of comfort is your anodyne in these stormy times.

You touch on a theme here that I was just reflecting on last night with my wife, Betty, and that is how comfortable I am with those who have lived so long ago.  

Not being a historian, but appreciating history; not being a politician but appreciating that combat zone; not being a theologian but appreciating theologians, especially Thomas Aquinas and Augustan of Hippo; but being very much a philosopher without traditional credentials, I savor your remarks.

We are in an age that celebrates Folly as our god in technology with all the fall out that you might expect. 

There are no more giants anymore, only billionaires; no Copernicus, Kepler, or Galileo, not even an Einstein.  

When we think of Einstein, we forget he sat in his patent office with no laboratory dreaming of riding a light beam.  What seems to be missing in the  last hundred years or so is imagination.  

I claim in my writing that this is because we are consumed with chronological time and critical thinking which deals only with that arbitrary standard of time of man, and thinking only in terms of what is already known instead of psychological time and creative thinking, which is in the moment and of what is not known but can be found out.

When you think in terms of one-step-at-a-time, you seldom get off the dime.

The irony and paradox is that we have electronic social media which is designed to bring us closer together but actually separates us at a greater distance by some electronic contraction.   

We are obsessed with wars on everything from poverty to drugs to ideologies which only seem to spawn greater division and, of course, ever widening the gap between "what is" and what is sought.

Being reared strict Irish Roman Catholic, it is not hard for me to imagine Martin Luther and Thomas More taking their stands while I keep reading books on Erasmus but remain ambivalent about him.  I can see men of the present being very much like Erasmus, not like them.   

I'm reading a "Book of the Letters of Kurt Vonnegut" compiled by Dan Wakefield and just completed reading the excellent biography of George Kennan (An American Life) by John Lewis Gaddis.  

Vonnegut and Kennan are both Midwestern Americans of whom I have a partiality, as I don't think the rest of the country matches our timber of candor.  Vonnegut was a free thinker; Kennan the consummate diplomat; both with imagination, something I find missing in current American lexicon.  It is not a happy time.

Entomologist E.O Wilson in his autobiography said, "I have had a great life in a terrible century."  I can relate to that.

As always, it is good to hear from you.

Jim