PERSONAL
IDENTITY
Or
WHO FLOATS
YOUR BOAT?
James R.
Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January
7, 2019
REFERENCE
A writer here shares the odyssey of the
growth of a man. Life can be of many
chapters with the spirit of invention.
Or it can be an accidental affair that locks a person into circumstances
deemed beyond his capacity to change.
People slip into such roles often to
envy others who have escaped, believing they must be gifted, special, different
or simply lucky. A more mundane
explanation is that preparation has a way of meeting opportunity.
Whatever the circumstances, rationalization
seldom proves either comforting or useful, but instead to chaos, confusion, and
even bitterness.
Our toxic culture promotes comfort
and complacency, self-pity and self-indulgence.
Rather than encouraging self-reliance, it finds us looking to family,
the church, the company, the government or, indeed, our friends to bail us out of
the consequences of our poor choices. Unwittingly,
society has participated in this charade creating dependence on surreal demands
and false expectations.
The irony is that most people today for
the first time in human history are in an earthly paradise walking on acres of
diamonds.
As readers familiar with The Peripatetic Philosopher know, he often
gravitates from the personal to the societal, as reflected in The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend
(1995):
To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves
is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons. The same holds true of ourselves.
We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes
of the novels inscribed in our hearts. Everyone’s
life without exception is sacred, unique, scripted high drama, played out
before an audience of one, with but one actor on stage. The sooner we realize this the more quickly
we overcome the bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves.
This is equally true for a country and
society, indeed, for a civilization.
A READER WRITES:
MY RESPONSE:
We all must float our own boat. Whatever our point of view, sometimes that boat is a bit crowded. If only people read more, they would understand what this reader means when he says, “Persons who invented all the innovations over the centuries.”
For example, our lives often parallel Homer’s Odyssey more than that of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
English poet John Donne (1572 – 1631) was able to write in the 16th century:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.
Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) in the same period, wrote:
To thine ownself be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou cast not then be false to any man.
Yet, today, every man is seemingly an island unto himself and the last person to trusts is himself. How did this happen?
BEST OF TIMES, WORST OF TIMES
Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870) in his novel “A Tale of Two Cities” (1859) was writing about the turbulent French Revolution (1789):
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness . . .”
Work Without Managers (1991) opened with this quote, a reference that seemingly refuses to fade.
These are “the best of times,” yet more police officers died of suicide than in the line of duty in 2018. Likewise, more men and women serving in the military died of suicide than in combat in that same year.
In 2012, 56 million people died throughout the world: 120,000 from wars; 500,000 in crime related deaths; and 800,000 from suicide, while another 1.5 million died of diabetes.
Yuval Noah Harari writes in Homo Deus (2017):
Sugar is more dangerous than gunpowder.
In terms of the conveniences of life; the comforts of our homes; the ease with which we travel and communicate with friends near and far; the entertainments and respites from the stresses of life that are available to us through multiple media, including the Internet; the medicines and healthcare systems accessible to us providing the possibility of living into our 80s or beyond, not to mention enjoying climate controlled homes with air conditioning and heat pump systems, along with precision controlled automobiles; indeed, today, we are able to live more comfortably than potentates, popes, monarchs and emperors of five hundred to a thousand years ago. It would be insane to be unhappy with all this, right?
Well, clearly, we are not. Indeed, with all this we are not happy campers because in the process of accumulating all these toys of comfort we have lost our moral compass and our way. We have lost the will to take responsibility for our lives.
We have forgotten happiness is not a matter of satisfying our needs, but a mindset. Philosopher Alan W. Watts claims:
In terms of the conveniences of life; the comforts of our homes; the ease with which we travel and communicate with friends near and far; the entertainments and respites from the stresses of life that are available to us through multiple media, including the Internet; the medicines and healthcare systems accessible to us providing the possibility of living into our 80s or beyond, not to mention enjoying climate controlled homes with air conditioning and heat pump systems, along with precision controlled automobiles; indeed, today, we are able to live more comfortably than potentates, popes, monarchs and emperors of five hundred to a thousand years ago. It would be insane to be unhappy with all this, right?
Well, clearly, we are not. Indeed, with all this we are not happy campers because in the process of accumulating all these toys of comfort we have lost our moral compass and our way. We have lost the will to take responsibility for our lives.
We have forgotten happiness is not a matter of satisfying our needs, but a mindset. Philosopher Alan W. Watts claims:
“As soon as you define happiness, you lose it.”
Nor is happiness a matter of satisfying our needs. Happiness is finding satisfaction in doing what we love, as the writer (above) has found in art. Needs, in any case, are often confused with wants, and wants, like greed are impossible to satisfy because greed always wants more.
Nor is happiness a matter of satisfying our needs. Happiness is finding satisfaction in doing what we love, as the writer (above) has found in art. Needs, in any case, are often confused with wants, and wants, like greed are impossible to satisfy because greed always wants more.
Advertisers know this and are skilled in pushing the “want button” for all it is worth. This limitation is not confined to us ordinary souls. A friend of Saul Bellows, Nobel Laureate for Literature, once told me while having dinner with him in Chicago, “Saul could never get over the fact that he could only win the Nobel Prize once.”
Bestselling authors, due to publishers’ demands or personal greed, once they write a bestseller, often keep rewriting the same book again and again, sinking into despair when sales fall off, some even committing suicide, as writing for them has become a trap of no escape.
Acclaim, no matter how exalting, can never fill spiritual emptiness, and spiritual emptiness is predicated on devolving into a one dimensional life and career. Escape requires due diligence often taking a “time out” to reassess where you are and where you are going, as this writer indicates in his storied career finally reaching his desired vocation, that of the artist.
THE CROWDED BOAT OF SOCIETY
Oswald Spengler (1880 – 1936) wrote “Decline in the West.” To this day, he is widely criticized for his outrageous assertion that the Western world was witnessing its last season – “the winter time” of a Faustian Civilization.
Spengler considers the European-American culture one of the high cultures, and such cultures have a lifespan of about one thousand years of flourishing, and then experience inevitable decline. He writes:
“Western Man is a proud but tragic figure because, while he strives and creates, he secretly knows that his actual goals, whatever they may be, will never be reached.”
Sound familiar?
In these “Tutorials,” it is suggested that the reality of our imagination and the imagination of our reality have come to clash with one another creating artificial constructs of our existence only to be treated as truth personified.
In point of fact, everything we have created has sprung from our imagination with the ephemeral consistency of smoke if we look at it closely.
We see this on Wall Street where the Dow Jones Industrials have plummeted more than 2,000 points in recent days based on FEARS, not on the actual financial performance of the companies listed. This is crazy, but craziness has become the norm.
If anyone has had the opportunity to visit the Mayan ruins, they know that Maya was once a great civilization. The Maya civilization was at its peak in 909 CE in population, art, architecture, engineering, and social sophistication. One hundred years later it lay in ruins.
Maya, after growing in cultural refinement over a thousand years, cities and towns came to be abandoned in a matter of decades. It remains a mystery to this day as to why.
That said it appears Maya people exhausted their natural resources, the primary sources of their energy, as they polluted their lakes and canals, and deforested nearly the entire region by the tenth century.
Fewer trees meant less rain, leading to droughts coupled with soil erosions from mudslides, as soil blew away on the wind, reducing the ability of Mayans to raise food. Forests capture moisture from the air and recycle it, increasing rainfall. With deforestation the Maya found themselves without a buffer. Violence increased as cities warred on cities, and crime became the target of dwindling resources. Mayans became victims of conditions created through self-indulgence, something we are experiencing in our own world today.
It is the reason for Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-Indulgent America (2018), which was written not to alarm but alert, not on a global bases but in a personal sense. We get better one person at a time.
Scholar and computer scientist Ramez Naam in an otherwise optimistic work (The Infinite Resource: the power of ideas on a finite planet, 2013), writes:
Forecasts now show seas rising three to six feet by the end of the twenty-first century, enough to displace millions of people from coastal cities and villages. In the United States, nearly all of New Orleans, and large chunks of Miami, Tampa, Virginia Beach, and New York City are three feet above sea level. On our present course and speed, a child born this year is likely to live to see the day when some of these cities are just memories.
Personal and collective identity have a way of merging in harmony or chaos. Which is to rule?
Bestselling authors, due to publishers’ demands or personal greed, once they write a bestseller, often keep rewriting the same book again and again, sinking into despair when sales fall off, some even committing suicide, as writing for them has become a trap of no escape.
Acclaim, no matter how exalting, can never fill spiritual emptiness, and spiritual emptiness is predicated on devolving into a one dimensional life and career. Escape requires due diligence often taking a “time out” to reassess where you are and where you are going, as this writer indicates in his storied career finally reaching his desired vocation, that of the artist.
THE CROWDED BOAT OF SOCIETY
Oswald Spengler (1880 – 1936) wrote “Decline in the West.” To this day, he is widely criticized for his outrageous assertion that the Western world was witnessing its last season – “the winter time” of a Faustian Civilization.
Spengler considers the European-American culture one of the high cultures, and such cultures have a lifespan of about one thousand years of flourishing, and then experience inevitable decline. He writes:
“Western Man is a proud but tragic figure because, while he strives and creates, he secretly knows that his actual goals, whatever they may be, will never be reached.”
Sound familiar?
In these “Tutorials,” it is suggested that the reality of our imagination and the imagination of our reality have come to clash with one another creating artificial constructs of our existence only to be treated as truth personified.
In point of fact, everything we have created has sprung from our imagination with the ephemeral consistency of smoke if we look at it closely.
We see this on Wall Street where the Dow Jones Industrials have plummeted more than 2,000 points in recent days based on FEARS, not on the actual financial performance of the companies listed. This is crazy, but craziness has become the norm.
If anyone has had the opportunity to visit the Mayan ruins, they know that Maya was once a great civilization. The Maya civilization was at its peak in 909 CE in population, art, architecture, engineering, and social sophistication. One hundred years later it lay in ruins.
Maya, after growing in cultural refinement over a thousand years, cities and towns came to be abandoned in a matter of decades. It remains a mystery to this day as to why.
That said it appears Maya people exhausted their natural resources, the primary sources of their energy, as they polluted their lakes and canals, and deforested nearly the entire region by the tenth century.
Fewer trees meant less rain, leading to droughts coupled with soil erosions from mudslides, as soil blew away on the wind, reducing the ability of Mayans to raise food. Forests capture moisture from the air and recycle it, increasing rainfall. With deforestation the Maya found themselves without a buffer. Violence increased as cities warred on cities, and crime became the target of dwindling resources. Mayans became victims of conditions created through self-indulgence, something we are experiencing in our own world today.
It is the reason for Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-Indulgent America (2018), which was written not to alarm but alert, not on a global bases but in a personal sense. We get better one person at a time.
Scholar and computer scientist Ramez Naam in an otherwise optimistic work (The Infinite Resource: the power of ideas on a finite planet, 2013), writes:
Forecasts now show seas rising three to six feet by the end of the twenty-first century, enough to displace millions of people from coastal cities and villages. In the United States, nearly all of New Orleans, and large chunks of Miami, Tampa, Virginia Beach, and New York City are three feet above sea level. On our present course and speed, a child born this year is likely to live to see the day when some of these cities are just memories.
Personal and collective identity have a way of merging in harmony or chaos. Which is to rule?
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