The Peripatetic Philosopher has a conversation:

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.