WHY NOW?
AN INTERIM ASSESSMENT
An
Exchange with a Reader
JAMES
R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.
©
August 27, 2017
A READER WRITES:
I
continue to ruminate about all this, and I think most humans follow and obey
the rules of a hierarchy because of the herd instinct which occurs in much of
nature and which helps whoever is on top.
In
looking back on my life I have seen these two controlling factors in my
life. Hierarchy mattered somewhat at Newberry College a Lutheran affiliated institution where I
majored in English literature, but had two English professors who did not
encouraged herd thinking. When I went to Emory to do graduate work in
comparative literature, I ran into the herd mentality.
I
left and joined the Air Force and became an aircraft maintenance officer.
In that capacity I was able to question and was not punished, but many times
ignored as they moved me up the chain of command in maintenance and rank.
After
the Air Force I became an English teacher while I went to USF to study
art. During the time I was working on my MFA there too was
an undercurrent that only certain kinds of art were acceptable which I ignored
and still received my degree.
When
I started teaching art I found I had a lot of freedom in the classroom, and I
encouraged freedom of thought among my students as they gained the
skills. However, for the most part the administrators did not like
questioning anything and encouraged the herd mentality.
Over
all from my experience and from experiencing and reading history, the hierarchy
in many areas controls from the top by encouraging the herd mentality in the
corporate, religious or political world and any dissent is either ignored or
punished if it threatens one of those structures.
DR. FISHER
RESPONDS:
This is an extremely
wise and perceptive discourse. I also
applaud your empirical assessment of your life experience as the guide to your
consciousness.
There is much wisdom in
what you say corroborated by your own life experience.
You quietly have found a
way to demonstrate a course of action that served you in your quest to be
useful to others, and in being so, not only useful to yourself, but successful
in removing barriers from others, especially your students, which has allowed them
to seek and find their own specialness.
What you encountered in
the military, the ultimate corporate society, is representative of my
experience in the corporation. The difference is that at every level
something in me was resistant to this herd mentality, which you identify so
clearly.
It started for me back in
grammar school. Some of the Sisters of St. Francis attempted to make me
"fit" into the preconceived Catholic mode, while others, fortunately for
me, gave me a great opportunity to test my wings.
In high school
athletics, only my varsity basketball coach allowed me such freedom; the other
coaches in football, baseball and track attempted to make me conform, which I
never did, at least to their satisfaction.
Academically, I was
fortunate to have had a great math teacher in my junior and senior year of high
school, as well as a good chemistry and history teacher. They saw something in my rebellious nature
that didn’t distract them from their appointed task to educate. Consequently, they allowed me to blossom.
At university, my
professors in chemistry and literature were themselves not confined to the herd
mentality recognizing a similar disposition in me. Ironically, I stayed
in chemistry and rejected their literary counsel until I retired from the demands
of an economic life.
Books, however, would remain
my staple over the years with their influence on what I should read. I compare this metaphorically to a gestation period
in preparation to the ultimate challenge of trying to become a writer. I’ve never known a writer who was not first a
reader. They go together in terms of
nourishment like eating and sleeping.
From the very first as a
bench chemist in industry, it felt all wrong.
It personified the herd mentality with a clear hierarchy and doing everything
the way things had always been done. In
a word, it was not a happy experience.
Surprisingly, as an
enlisted man in the US Navy, where the herd mentality is exercised in spades, I
didn't mind it; indeed, I loved the Navy from the very first; still do; still
look back on my military service with nostalgia. Now, why is that?
This surprised a lot of
people who thought they knew me, including myself, but it shouldn't have, given
the fact that I was besotted with Irish Roman Catholicism. Nothing is more totally the herd mentality than
the church with her instrumental orderliness to rival that of the military.
Everyone's life story should be one of discovery, as yours clearly
has been. Everyone's life story should be a personal assessment and
evaluation of that life experience in terms of what is true and false, real and
imagined, good and bad, what has worked and what has not, and what is
self-enhancing and self-rejecting.
There were legitimate
reasons for the dominance of the herd mentality throughout man's history as
Eric Hoffer has gone to some pains to explain in terms of mass
movements. Gustave Le Bon has done the same with his explanation of the
nature of mass psychology.
Your very brief
assessment of what you perceive and why, holds within it a possible clue as to
why this current preoccupation with the removal of landmarks -- statutes and
monuments, books, songs and poems, and other historical artifacts -- of famous people
who once owned slaves in the nearly four hundred year history of Europeans on
American soil.
Slavery was a despicable
industry and wrong and a permanent scar on America’s heritage. Given that fact, what in terms of subtext is
currently going on? And why now?
I've asked myself why
this insanity has surfaced now when it has always been part of our subconscious
or unconscious reality.
A possible reason is that the hierarchy pecking order that has
always existed in the annals of man’s history is possibly in trouble. The
structure of society which is so dependent on the reliability and
sustainability of the hierarchical infrastructure to maintain some efficiency
and some sense of order is showing evidence of some deterioration.
The family has collapsed;
the church has lost its mission; the school has become a combat zone; industry has
spiraled into dysfunction as a competitive jungle; the political system is in
chaos, and the government has lost its way.
As often as I am wont to
be repetitive, I have been nipping at the heels of this situation for ages in
an attempt to define it as I see the problem.
This is evident in my writing where I address the problem of leaderless
leadership and dissonant workers, corporate sin and retreat from the culture of
contribution to the twin cultures of comfort and complacency.
But this may be my own
limited ability to sense the apparent breakdown of hierarchies with the
seemingly vacuum that this deterioration has seemingly created.
To put it more boldly,
when NOBODY IS IN CHARGE, the natives tend to go wild!
This is what we are
seeing and no one knows what to do about it because everyone is looking at the
problem in terms of content and context, and not the subtext where it has
erupted to the surface.
It happened in the French Revolution with the "Reign of Terror"
with Robespierre (1758 -1794) at the controls who orchestrated the
"terror" with the guillotine.
By doing so, he prostituted the reason for the revolution. He lathered up the French people’s hatred of
the monarchy and its abuses instead of guiding them to responsible engagement in
the promotion of “liberty, equality and fraternity,” which had been the battle
cry of the revolution. Robespierre would
perish at the tender age of 36 by that same instrument he released to the collective
madness of the time, losing his own head to that guillotine.
Hate, vengeance,
violence and real and/or imagined transgressions of the past ultimately backfire
as the disenchanted become victims of their own excesses. It is a matter
of history.
Once all these monuments
of the past are destroyed, what has been accomplished?
Chances are it paradoxically
reifies what was silently on display and taken for granted as just that, inanimate
objects of little interest to the majority, but because of all the attention now
magnified into significance.
No one ever "gets
even" for past transgressions against human indignities. By the same
token, no one forgets these transgressions, or should they. Most people, however, triumph over them by
demonstrating love, compassion, understanding and empathy. Morality is
always a matter of the mind of the times.
Philosophers such as
Socrates and Plato, Lao-Tzu, Confucius, St. Augustine, John Du Scot, Thomas
Aquinas, Erasmus, Montaigne, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Kant, Paine, Burke,
Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Bentham, Dewey, Smith, Mill, Weber, Arendt, Havel,
among others, have been saying this for centuries.
If we are, indeed,
experiencing a breakdown of the hierarchy, then we are losing our grip on a
pecking order.
When people no longer
believe in a pecking order, no longer believe in "law & order,"
constitutional authority, the principles of rational conduct, and are only out
for themselves projecting their anxiety if not their madness on the body
politic than we have Charlottesville, Virginia, North Korea, a "Do
Nothing" US Congress, an infantile US President, and equally infantile
media, and an educational system that trains fresh minds for high end jobs and
not for spiritual, intellectual and moral integrity.
My thirty part NOWHERE
MAN IN NOWHERE LAND (e-books on Kindle’s amazon.com) was written with this in
mind, but I sense, again, that I was only chipping away at the heels of the problem
while the subtext of unconscious man was roaring to the surface. Civility
is a very fragile construct.
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