The Peripatetic Philosopher : Has America become one giant Jerry Springer show?

A TUTORIAL OF IDEAS

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

© October 23, 2018

Reference:

People write to me via e-mail on a regular basis with comments or criticisms or explanations soliciting my response, not necessarily to convince them one way or the other about their reflections but to use me as a sounding board for their ideas. 

When I’m in a writing project, I fail to respond but I do not delete their offerings.  I am currently between books and thought this would be a good time to launch this little forum. 

We are in a dramatic time, a time that those in power would prefer to deny, but nonetheless are being marginalized by, for and because of it.  True, they still hold the power even though they do not control the source of power, which is knowledge amazingly distributed throughout the populace.  

Those in power have successfully created a passive responsive society, successfully carrying it through the 20^th century and into the 21^st century, manipulating and managing to support their egregious self-interests, but alas, they can no longer afford the luxury of this style or support its demands.  In short, they are not in charge, but who is?  The answer: no one is.

Modern leaders do not rule.  They react, manage and steer, taking the least controversial action leaving the situation to fester, the people to remain confused, and the chaos to mount while precariously maintaining their power.

The conundrum is that the reality of the imagination and the imagination of reality has hit a wall.  As a consequence, all the aberrancy of behavior and false striving are expressions of the “Present Ridiculous.”  

A Facebook blogger summarized the present with this lament:

 Am I the only one who thinks that America has become one giant Jerry Springer show?

Into the void with no one in charge, people are becoming their own doctors by surfacing the Internet for the causes of their maladies.  They are reading books by so-called experts and finding them not only wanting but failing to compute with their life experiences. 

People are painting, making furniture, sculpting and writing poetry, not to realize acclaim but to give spiritual expression to the wonder within.  

It is the “Age of the Amateur,” as it was some 500 years ago when monks and priests and other clerics secretly pursued science at the risk of losing their lives to the Roman Catholic Inquisition for going against Church doctrine, while ultimately changing the world. 

We are now jammed up with managers who are atavistic, professionals trained for anachronistic functions, leaders who actually thought leading was separate from following, which has given rise to leaderless leadership, as there are no leaders anymore only pretenders in these roles. 

People at the top thought that they stirred the drink of contemporary life, but they were wrong.  Change comes from the bottom of the social structure, seldom from the top.  With that as introduction, let the tutorial begin.

BELIEF IN GOD

Jim,

This occurred to me today. The belief in a God makes humans feel more significant since the universe is so large and the earth is infinitely small speck in comparison. We want to feel special which we are not and thinking that a God made humans makes many feel less insignificant.

Klaus

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Klaus,

Whether you are a believer in God or not, most people would admit that Klaus has a point. Why do so many of us believe in God?  

He also has a point in implying that believing gives the believer comfort in his consciousness to the fact that he, alone, is a conscience animal on this hostile planet,  This first gave birth to the shaman, then the tribal chief, then the king as God’s anointed, and then to religions of all sorts ultimately crystallizing for Western Man in Christianity some 2,000 years ago.

St. Paul, the architect of Christianity, successfully posited the Christian myth that human freedom was not to be found on earth, but only in the Kingdom of Heaven.  He successfully preached this message to the Gentiles, leaving James, the brother of Jesus, to remain isolated in Judea unable to support much less fathom the ambitions of Paul.  

German philosopher Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831) claims Christianity had the right concept of freedom but managed to seduce the faithful with the idea that freedom was not to be found in this life.  They failed to realize that God did not create man, but rather that man created God; that man created God as a projection of the idea of freedom.

Meanwhile, from Hegel's philosophical point of view, Christianity became a faith of enslavement, of conformity and alienation, and would lead ultimately to the "divided self" of Western Man, with man often acting against himself.

Christians of every description would challenge this while in many ways personifying this assessment. That said, Christianity has been the life force of Western Civilization, and without that spiritual commitment over the centuries there would be no forum for this exchange.

PS If this forum is to have any viability, readers will invariably be exposed to ideas perhaps in conflict with their own.  We are in a secular age, but millenniums of religious faith have given us the world we find ourselves living in.